Former UAW President Douglas Fraser Remembered
April 14, 2008

Hundreds of union members, political figures and corporate executives gathered with family members Saturday for a memorial service honoring former United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser, who died Feb 23 at age 91.

Fraser led the union through its zenith in the 1970s and through the bleak times of the 1980s. He played a key role in saving Chrysler from bankruptcy. In exchange for workers agreeing to concessions to save Chrysler, Fraser gained a seat on Chrysler’s board, making him the first major union chief on the board of a large corporation.

Always approachable and quick-witted, Fraser –- everyone called him Doug -– led the union through one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. labor history. When Fraser took over the helm of the UAW in 1978, membership was its peak of 1.5 million people. But rising gas prices and soaring sales of fuel-efficient Japanese cars were endangering the very survival of Detroit’s bleeding auto companies, with Chrysler suffering the worst.

Fraser convinced union workers at Chrysler to agree to a $3 an hour pay cut and gave the OK for the automaker to eliminate half of its 100,000 blue-collar jobs. Fraser also aggressively lobbied for legislation that allowed for a $1.2 billion federally guaranteed loan to bail out Chrysler.

A Personal Memory

A number of times, I had the honor of moderating a panel discussion on the history and current state of Detroit’s automotive industry to Detroit newcomers through Wayne State University, where Fraser taught after his retirement from the union. Doug Fraser was a mainstay of my panel.

He started each talk the same way. He’d dig into his pocket and flip out a booklet the size of a passport and with as few pages. He’d hold it up to his audience. “This,” he’d say, “was the first UAW contract.” He’d then go on to describe today’s contracts: intensely complex to say nothing of being several inches of stacked paper.

With just as much passion as the previous time, he would tell his personal story of being born in Scotland in 1916 –- he was especially proud of his Scottish heritage -– moving to Detroit at age 6 with his family and being raised during the Great Depression. To the dismay of his father who wanted him to go to college, Fraser dropped out of high school and went to work in small machine shops in the Detroit area. He was fired for trying to organize a union during those days of horrific working conditions and subsequent sit-down strikes.

Fraser then worked at the Chrysler DeSoto plant and was elected president of Local 227 in 1944, where he was noticed by the labor pioneer and former UAW President Walter P. Reuther. Fraser became his administrative assistant in 1950 and began climbing the leadership ranks of the UAW.

During my panel, Fraser would regal the audience with tales of the early days of union organizing through the historic 104-day strike against Chrysler in the 1950s that won workers pensions to the dark days of near bankruptcy at Chrysler. He’d sprinkle in his views on the current state of labor, the auto industry and politics, subjects he stayed abreast on until the end. The New York Times noted in its obituary on Fraser that only the month before his death, Fraser called the paper to comment on an article on Toyota. He remarked “I hate them -– because they’re so good.”

Fraser noted during one of those last panel discussions that current UAW leader Ron Gettelfinger had a tougher job than he did in an even more tumultuous time, during a time with striking similarities to Fraser’s era as UAW chief with soaring gas prices and the onslaught of global competition that forced the union to make concessions again.

Fraser was 88 the last time I moderated the discussion. Suffering from emphysema, he toted an oxygen tank along with him. But he didn’t lack a speck of enthusiasm.

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