Fraser Goes into High Gear

A savvy Scot is in the driver's seat as auto talks open

Early this week United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser leads a phalanx of union representatives into the orange-carpeted fifth-floor conference room at General Motors headquarters in Detroit to open triennial contract negotiations with the Big Three automakers. The outcome of the most important labor negotiation of the year will significantly affect inflation and wage rates in other industries. Much will depend on Fraser, who is making his debut as chief negotiator for the 1.5-million-member union that he has headed since 1977. TIME Detroit Correspondent Michael Moritz analyzes the man whom the auto chiefs will confront.

Late on a dismal, rainy Friday night a motley crowd in Detroit's smoky Woodbridge Tavern listens to a woman with fierce ginger hair punching out tunes on a ravaged piano. Over the chatter, the president of the third largest union in the U.S. clutches a microphone and, in a gravelly voice, leads the house in a rendering of Solidarity Forever. Douglas Fraser has been singing this union anthem for almost half a century now, his own career paralleling the rise of the U.A.W. He is the last of a generation of labor leaders bred in the rich liberal traditions of American trade unionism.

A silver-haired six-footer with a deeply seamed face, Fraser, 62, retains the liberal's faith in the American people, but is vocal about his disenchantment with the nation's leadership. Says he: "The auto workers have a feeling that Government could screw up a two-car funeral. What you've got in the House of Representatives is 435 baronies--with a few exceptions --and it is almost as bad in the Senate."

He accuses Jimmy Carter of a lack of leadership, and he leans toward Ted Kennedy, whose views he shares on national health insurance, on legislation to prevent big company mergers and on the creation of a national energy corporation to compete with the oil companies in finding new sources, and developing them.

Ideologically, Fraser is further left than his union, a blue-collared bundle of tensions divided on social and economic issues and standing outside the AFL-CIO. During the 1976 negotiations, when he was a U.A.W. vice president, Fraser pressed to have auto workers elected to the Chrysler board. He admits that his bargaining committee "was kind of relieved when I pulled the proposal off the table during the last couple of days." He does not plan to make an issue of it this year, although he admires the West German system of having some workers serve as directors. As a civilian police commissioner in Detroit, Fraser insisted on affirmative-action hiring policies within the police force.

Born in Glasgow in 1916, Fraser can remember his father returning home from work in a distillery and lighting the fire with pilfered whisky. He was six when the family moved to Detroit and his father got work in Ford's River Rouge plant. After quitting high school in the eleventh grade because he was "impatient and bored," Fraser got a job packing cork insulation around water heaters; he was fired for trying to organize a union. Later he went to work for 75-c- an hour at the Chrysler De Soto plant, but left the shop floor to become a union staffer in 1947 and, shortly thereafter, one of Walter Reuther's right-hand men. When Reuther died in 1970, Fraser competed closely with Leonard Woodcock for the presidency. Woodcock won a narrow majority in the U.A.W. vote board; Fraser withdrew and urged that the election be made unanimous. That gracious gesture perhaps ensured his own election to the $59,000 post in 1977, when Woodcock reached the mandatory retirement age of 65.

Popular in the U.A.W. as a man whom workers can grab by the lapels "for a beer and bull shit," as a union staffer puts it, Fraser is also welcomed by company negotiators at the bargaining table.

Says Chrysler Vice President William M.

O'Brien: "He is a better negotiator than Walter [Reuther] and clearly a better negotiator than Leonard [Woodcock]. If Doug says this is the way it is going to be, you can put that in the bank."

Fraser is not eager for a strike and he cites the union's modest settlement in 1958, another slumping year for the industry. But the last year that talks were concluded without a strike was 1964, and the two sides are starting out far apart. If a settlement has not been reached by the Sept. 14 contract expiration date, the betting is that Fraser would select General Motors for a strike target rather than Ford or the financially stricken Chrysler.

The union refuses to specify its wage demands yet, but they surely will not be mini-sized; Fraser declared last April that the 7% guidelines had "self-destructed."

He insists too that the "No. 1 priority demand" is to adopt a cost of living escalator for union pensioners. Fraser intends to push for a four-day work week, though he will probably have to battle for a few more days off with pay (auto workers can now take 39.5 of them a year).

The U.A.W. strike fund is flush with $280 million, but leaders worry about an apathetic membership. Says Woody Ferguson, president of Detroit's 17,000-member Local 174: "The members think of coming to only two meetings every three years. At the first they want to know how much we are asking for; at the second they want to know how much we got."

There is some fear for the unions future after Fraser and other senior officers retire. A whole group of the committed, heads-busted-on-picket-lines generation has to be out by 1983. Fraser is the first to admit that the union could "go the way of all flesh." But he is convinced that "we are steeped in tradition and history that is apt to produce a certain kind of leadership." Surely tomorrow's auto union chiefs, whoever they are, will learn quite a bit from watching how Fraser handles the problem of asking for more in a lean year.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.