Reuther, walter

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PC ref T of Detroit ~ by Nixon?

Reuther's Treaty of Detroit was a five-year contract negotiated by trade union president Walter Reuther between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and General Motors in 1950. The UAW reached similar deals with the other members of the Big Three automakers, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler. The UAW agreed to a long-term contract, which protected automakers from annual strikes, and it gave up the right to bargain over some issues in exchange for extensive health, unemployment, and pension benefits; expanded vacation time; and cost-of-living adjustments to wages.

The contract shaped labor-management relations in the auto industry for decades, and it was used as a model for labor-corporation agreements in a variety of other industries.^[1]

Prior negotiations

Upon the conclusion of World War II, both the automakers and autoworkers were free to address grievances that had accumulated during the war.^[2] The two sides would enter multiple contract negotiations in the decades following the end of the war. Reuther's Treaty of Detroit was a notable achievement for the UAW that followed three rounds of negotiations since 1945.

The first negotiation after the war began with a strike of 320,000 GM workers on November 21, 1945, with Reuther demanding a 30% wage increase and a pledge from GM not to raise car prices. The strike lasted 113 days and was ultimately undermined by settlements reached with Ford and Chrysler, who agreed to wage increases from 18 to 18.5 cents. The United Electrical Workers (UE), representing 30,000 GM employees, the United Steel Workers, and the rubber workers also settled for 18.5 cents, forcing the UAW to follow suit. Despite the failure of the strike, Reuther had been seen as an aggressive leader throughout and he capitalized on the image to attain the presidency of UAW.^[3]

The 1946 strike, which became known as the First Round, was followed by a Second Round of negotiations in 1947. The 1947 contract with General Motors included a major change, the cost-of-living allowance (COLA). The first scheme of its kind in a mass-production industry, COLA pegged a workers wage to the cost-of-living index of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.^[4][5]

The third round was negotiated by Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the union and achieved a thirteen-cent-an-hour increase in wages from the Chrysler Corporation. Reuther began the Fourth Round in January 1949, which would result in his Treaty of Detroit.^[6]

Goals

After World War II, health and welfare had become critical issues in labor contracts across industries, and Reuther chose pensions and company-funded medical care as the focus of his bargaining in 1949. Since inflation in the postwar economy had reduced the significance of the $32 a month benefit from Social Security, the issue of pensions had become more important than ever.

Historically, retirement security was an individual responsibility. In particular, since the recipient of a pension was, by definition, no longer an employee, companies had argued that a pension could not be their responsibility. Reuther believed that retirement did not end a worker's association with a union, and workers deserved a lifelong pension.^[7] Reuther was adamant that the pension plans be fully funded, actuarially sound (the amount set needed to be set to the life expectancies of the pensioners), and noncontributory, with the full cost borne by the company.^[8]

The automakers were principally concerned with negotiating a longer contract to protect the manufacturers from annual strikes, avoid the costs of undergoing negotiations each year, and give control over long-term scheduling of production, model changes, and tool and plant investment.^[9]

Negotiations with Ford and Chrysler

Under Reuther, the UAW had adopted a strategy of collective bargaining in which the UAW negotiated with and threatened to strike only one of the Big Three automakers. Once concessions had been earned at one, in the next round of negotiations, the other two were likely to match terms of the first. Reuther called this strategy "getting a foot in the door."^[10]

In 1949, Reuther chose Ford as his first target. In 1947, Ford had offered its workers a choice between a contributory pension plan and wage increases. While the UAW took wage increases at the time, Reuther suspected that Ford might be most amenable to a pension plan.^[11] New management and an aging workforce at Ford also suggested that the UAW would have the best chances of success with Ford.^[12]

In September 1949, to avoid a strike, Ford agreed to pay $20 million a year to pay the entire cost of pensions. Workers with 30 years' service would receive $100 a month. Ford agreed that the pension plan would be both fully funded and actuarially sound.^[13]

After its success with Ford, the UAW moved on to Chrysler. While Chrysler was willing to match the $100-a-month pension plan, it refused to fund it fully. Not willing to yield on this point, Reuther initiated a strike that would last 104 days. It was during this strike that Reuther coined the phrase "too old to work and too young to die," referring to financially unsupported retirees. Chrysler gave in after nearly three months and $1 billion lost in sales.^[14]

Agreement with GM

Seeking to avoid the cost Chrysler had paid, GM negotiated a contract with the UAW a few weeks after Chrysler in 1950. The contract included a fully funded, actuarially sound pension plan of $125 a month, including Social Security. The contract continued COLA and raised the annual improvement factor to 4 cents an hour.

Also, GM agreed to cover one half of the cost for workers and their families. The UAW, in return, agreed to a five-year term of the contract. Fortune named the contract the "Treaty of Detroit" and noted Reuther's impressive negotiating abilities. Ford and Chrysler soon negotiated contracts along the same lines as the Treaty.^[15]

Impact

The Treaty affected the lives of many laborers and influenced labor contracts and law making in the following decades. The "Treaty" made pensions and healthcare a permanent part of labor contracts. In 1974, funding was made a requirement for all plans. The Treaty, along with other gains made by the union over the next decade moved autoworkers in America into the middle class, with wages since the war nearly doubling and home ownership becoming common among laborers.^[16]

References

seekingmichigan.org -Retrieved 2012-07-04
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 102.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 103-108.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 138.
Dayton, Eldorous (1958). Walter Reuther: The Autocrat of the Bargaining Table. New York: Devin-Adain Company. p. 178.
Dayton, Eldorous (1958). Walter Reuther: The Autocrat of the Bargaining Table. New York: Devin-Adain Company. p. 179.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 141.
Reuther, Victor (1976). The Brothers Reuther and the Story of UAW. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 310. ISBN 9780395243046.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 143.
Lichtenstein, Nelson (1995). The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. New York: BasicBooks. p. 283. ISBN 9780465090808.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 140.
Lichtenstein, Nelson (1995). The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. New York: BasicBooks. p. 283. ISBN 9780465090808.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 140.
Lichtenstein, Nelson (1995). The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. New York: BasicBooks. p. 283-4. ISBN 9780465090808.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 142-143.
Barnard, John (1983). Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. p. 154.

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Walter Philip Reuther (/ˈruːθər/; September 1, 1907 – May 9, 1970) was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers (UAW) a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the mid 20th century. He was a socialist in the early 1930s and worked closely with the Communist Party in the auto industry in the middle and late 1930s. He was a leader in removing communists from the offices in UAW and CIO in the 1940s. By 1949 he had become a leading liberal and supporter of the New Deal coalition, working to strengthen the labor union movement, raise wages, and give union leaders a greater voice in state and national Democratic party politics. During the 1960s he was a major supporter of the civil rights movement.

Early life

Reuther was born on September 1, 1907 in Wheeling, West Virginia, the son of Anna (Stocker) and Valentine Reuther,^[1] a socialist brewery worker who had emigrated from Germany. Throughout his career he was close to his brothers and co-workers Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther. Reuther joined the Ford Motor Company in 1927 as an expert tool and die maker.^[2]:16 He was laid off in 1932 as the Great Depression worsened. His Ford employment record states that he quit voluntarily, but Reuther himself always maintained that he was fired for his increasingly visible socialist activities.^[2]: 33 He and his brother Victor went to Europe and then worked 1933–35 in an auto plant (GAZ) at Gorky in the Soviet Union, which was being built with the cooperation of Henry Ford. At the end of the trip he wrote, "the atmosphere of freedom and security, shop meetings with their proletarian industrial democracy; all these things make an inspiring contrast to what we know as Ford wage slaves in Detroit. What we have experienced here has reeducated us along new and more practical lines."^[2]:44Reuther returned to the United States where he found employment at General Motors and became an active member of the United Automobile Workers (UAW).

Reuther was a Socialist Party member. He may have paid dues to the Communist Party for some months in 1935–36, and he has been reported as attending a Communist Party planning meeting as late as February 1939.^[3] Reuther cooperated with the Communists in the later 1930s—this was the period of the Popular Front, and they agreed with him on internal issues of the UAW, but his associations were with anti-Stalinist socialists.^[2]

Reuther remained active in the Socialist Party and in 1937 failed in his attempt to be elected to the Detroit Common Council. However, impressed by the efforts by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to tackle inequality, he eventually joined the Democratic Party.

Union career

In 1936 he became president of United Automobile Workers Local 174 (with 100 members), which on paper had responsibility for 100,000 auto workers on the west side of Detroit, Michigan. Reuther led several strikes and in 1937 and 1940 was hospitalized after being badly beaten by strikebreakers. He survived two assassination attempts, and his right hand was permanently crippled in an attack on April 20, 1948.^[4]

He had a highly publicized confrontation with Ford security forces on May 26, 1937, also known as the Battle of the Overpass. By this time, thanks to the sit-down strikes, UAW membership had exploded and Local 174 was a power inside the UAW. As a senior union organizer, Reuther helped win major strikes for union recognition against General Motors in 1940 and Ford in 1941.

When Ford was automating its production lines, a Ford executive showed Reuther into a hall filled with machines, with just one or two human workers programming them, and joked, "How do you plan to get these boys to pay your union dues, Walter?" Reuther replied, "How do you plan to get them to buy your cars?"[citation ^needed]

Walter Reuther (right) conferring with President Truman in the Oval Office, 1952

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Reuther strongly supported the war effort and refused to tolerate wildcat strikes that might disrupt munitions production. He worked for the War Manpower Commission, the Office of Production Management, and the War Production Board.^[5] He led a 113-day strike against General Motors in 1945–1946; it only partially succeeded. He never received the power he wanted to inspect company books or have a say in management, but he achieved increasingly lucrative wage and benefits contracts.^[6]

In 1946 he narrowly defeated R. J. Thomas for the UAW presidency, and promptly he purged the UAW of all communist elements. He was active in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) umbrella as well, taking the lead in expelling 11 communist-led unions from the CIO in 1949.^[7]

As a prominent figure in the anti-communist left, he was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. He became president of the CIO in 1952, and negotiated a merger with George Meany and the American Federation of Labor immediately after, which took effect in 1955. In 1949 he led the CIO delegation to the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in opposition to the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions. He had left the Socialist Party in 1939, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s was a leading spokesman for liberal interests in the CIO and in the Democratic Party.^[8]

Reuther delivered contracts for his membership through brilliant negotiating tactics. He would pick one of the "big three" automakers, and if it did not offer concessions, he would strike it and let the other two absorb its sales. Besides high hourly wage rates and paid vacations, Reuther negotiated these benefits for his union: employer-funded pensions (beginning in 1950 at Chrysler), medical insurance (beginning at GM in 1950), and supplementary unemployment benefits (beginning at Ford in 1955). Reuther tried to negotiate lower automobile prices for the consumer with each contract, with limited success.^[9]

Walter Reuther (second from right) at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963

Toward the end of his life, when he took the UAW out of the AFL-CIO^[why?] for a short-lived alliance with the Teamsters union, and marched with the United Farm Workersin Delano, California, Reuther seemed to be dissatisfied, looking for the ability to challenge the injustices that had made the union movement so vital in the 1930s. He strongly supported the Civil Rights Movement with union organizers and finances, and his own continuing personal involvement. Reuther participated in both the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs (August, 1963) and the Selma to Montgomery March (March, 1965). He stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. while he made the "I Have A Dream" speech, during the 1963 March on Washington.^[10] Although critical of the Vietnam War, he supported Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and met weekly with President Johnson during 1964–65. He was instrumental in mobilizing UAW resources to minimize the threat that George Wallace would win more than ten percent of union votes (Wallace won about nine percent in the North).^[8]

In his prime, Reuther was influential and powerful enough to frighten conservatives. In 1958, later presidential candidate Barry Goldwater declared Reuther a "more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America."^[11]

Role in the 1964 chicken tax

Main article: Chicken tax

U.S. sales of VW vans in pickup and commercial configurations were curtailed by the chicken tax.

Reuther played a role in a historic episode during the early 1960s, known as the Chicken War. France and West Germany had placed tariffs on imports of U.S. chicken.^[12]Diplomacy failed and in January 1964, two months after taking office, President Johnson imposed a 25 percent tax (almost 10 times the average U.S. tariff) on potato starch, dextrin, brandy, and light trucks. Officially, the tax targeted items imported from Europe as approximating the value of lost American chicken sales to Europe.^[13]

In retrospect, audio tapes from the Johnson White House, revealed a quid pro quo unrelated to chicken. In January 1964, President Johnson attempted to persuade Reuther not to initiate a strike just prior to the 1964 election and to support the president's civil rights platform. Reuther in turn wanted Johnson to respond to Volkswagen's increased shipments to the United States.^[13]

The chicken tax directly curtailed importation of German-built Volkswagen Type 2 vans in configurations that qualified them as light trucks—that is, commercial vans and pickups.^[13] In 1964 U.S. imports of "automobile trucks" from West Germany declined to a value of $5.7 million—about one-third the value imported in the previous year. Soon after, Volkswagen cargo vans and pickup trucks, the intended targets, "practically disappeared from the U.S. market." As of March 2013, the chicken tax remains in effect.

Death

On May 9, 1970, Walter Reuther, his wife May, architect Oscar Stonorov, Reuther's bodyguard William Wolfman, the pilot and co-pilot were killed when their chartered Gates Learjet 23 crashed in flames at 9:33 p.m. Michigan time. The plane, arriving from Detroit in rain and fog, was on final approach to Pellston Regional Airport in Pellston, Michigan, near the union's recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan.^[14][15]The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that the plane's altimeter was missing parts, some incorrect parts were installed, and one of its parts had been installed upside down,^[16] leading some to speculate that Reuther may have been murdered.^[17]

Reuther had earlier survived an April 1948 incident in which he was hit by a shotgun blast through his kitchen window. Reuther happened to turn towards his wife, and was hit in the arm instead of the chest and heart. The crime was never solved.^[18]

Awards and Accolades

President Bill Clinton awarded Reuther the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1995.
Walter Reuther appears in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Reuther received the Eugene V. Debs Award in 1968 for his work in Industrial Unionism.^[19]

Legacy

Walter Reuther is the namesake for the largest labor archives in the United States, home to over 75,000 linear feet of original documents related to the labor movement. The Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs is located in Detroit and is part of Wayne State University.

Interstate 696 In Metro Detroit is named the Walter P. Reuther Freeway.

A hospital in Westland, Michigan, is named for him.

Reuther Middle School, part of the Rochester Community Schools in Rochester Hills, Michigan, is named for him.

Walter Reuther Central High School in Kenosha, Wisconsin is named for him, thanks to the UAW's significant presence at the city's former American Motors Corporation and Chrysler plants.

Through a single vote, the Court’s 5-4 Janus decision reverses decades of legal precedent that had obstructed part of the Koch’s pro-corporate agenda. That vote was secured with the Kochs’ help in bankrolling efforts that include: helping to maintain a GOP Senate majority; helping the Senate block President Obama from filling the February 2016 Supreme Court vacancy; and helping to win the confirmation of right-wing corporate activist Neil Gorsuch.

Janus helps cement the nation’s highest court as the Koch Court, and Charles Koch wants to keep it that way.

As Documented first detailed in partnership with the Intercept, for months the Kochs had been investing heavily in anticipation of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Court, which was announced on June 27, the same day as Janus. Earlier this year, the Koch group “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP) hired Sarah Field from the Koch-funded Federalist Society to spearhead its campaign to extend the Koch hold on the Court for perhaps a generation or more.

Despite claims by AFP that helping to seat Gorsuch was their “first” foray into Supreme Court nominations, the Koch effort to influence who becomes a judge and how they interpret the law goes back much further.

In fact, the Kochs have been investing in reshaping the law to suit their personal agenda for decades.For example, the Koch group Citizens for a Sound Economy, AFP’s predecessor, backed Clarence Thomas’ controversial confirmation to the Court more than 25 years ago.

The Kochs’ long-term agenda to remake the United States in their image is a multi-pronged effort that includes changing both the law and who makes or interprets the laws, including the anti-union Janus decision.

THE SEEDS OF JANUS

The effort to roll back union rights actually began almost a century ago, as wealthy industrialists objected to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, which enshrined the right to collective bargaining in the United States.

Many tycoons of the time, like Alfred Sloan, head of General Motors, opposed those rights along with other business reforms of FDR’s New Deal.

Fred Koch, co-founder of the corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini:

Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.

Only recently, through the investigative work of Jane Mayer, has the public learned that the Koch fortune was actually built in part on directly aiding Hitler by building the oil-cracking factory that became “a key component in the Nazi war machine.” As Mayer noted in her 2016 book Dark Money:The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, that factory refined high-octane fuel needed for the Luftwaffe, which targeted, terrorized, and killed many thousands of innocent civilians. Fred Koch’s praise of Germany came afterHitler’s air bombers helped murder 136 men, women, and children in Guernica in the Basque region, a tragedy made famous by the mural painted by Pablo Picasso.

Meanwhile, industrialists like Sloan pursued efforts to undo New Deal reforms. In 1947, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act. It gave states the power to pass “right-to-work” laws that undermined collective bargaining by not requiring workers who benefit from bargained rights to pay dues to the unions that secured and enforced them.

HOW THE KOCHS FERTILIZED “RIGHT-TO-WORK”

As Mayer noted:

[Fred Koch] was an early and active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an anti-labor group [founded in 1945] that was a forerunner of the National Right to Work Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff members explained the group’s ‘Astroturf’ strategy. In reality, he said, big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its ‘anonymous quarterbacks,’ and ‘call the turns.’ But he said they needed to sell the ‘yarn’ that the group was ‘composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen, professional people, wage earners-not big business industrialists.’ Otherwise, he admitted, the movement was ‘almost certainly doomed to failure.’

By 1954, an engineer from Wichita, Kan., Reed Larson,took a leave from his job at the Coleman Company, to launch Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work. The following year, former Rep. Fred Hartley, Jr., (R-N.J.) co-founded the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC). By 1958, the NRTWC was targeting six states to adopt right-to-work laws but it failed in every place, except Kansas.

“Fred [Koch] co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas,” Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean noted.

On Nov. 9, 1958, the New York Timesreported that right-to-work won in Kansas because anti-union views had taken hold, noting:

More campaign efforts and more money were expended on the emotion-provoking issue than on the campaigns of all Republican and Democratic state and Congressional candidates combined. … For the last 10 days or so before Election Day an organization called Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work flooded newspapers, television channels and other advertising media with appeals to ‘vote yes.’ These by far outnumbered the ‘vote no’ advertisements of unions opposing the amending.

A month later, Fred Koch joined Robert Welch and ten other men in Indianapolis to found the extreme rightwing group dubbed the “John Birch Society” (JBS).

As the Washington Post noted in its 1961 profile of JBS:

At the top of the Society’s structure in Wichita are several very wealthy industrialists. Oil engineer Fred Koch is president of the Rock Island Oil and Refining Co. A millionaire several times over, he is on the Society’s national council. … Wichita is the John Birch Society’s center of strength in Kansas, and one of its greatest in the country. … The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of the organizations that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right to work amendment to the State’s Constitution.

As detailed by Group Research Inc. in its 1962 history of JBS, Koch worked with both NRTWC and the Christian Crusade in arguing against union dues like those at issue in the Januscase.

A History of Hostility

In 1959, Fred Koch joined the Executive Committee to plan the JBS strategy to push back against what it viewed as communism in nearly every American institution.

In 1960, Koch published his polemic “A Business Man Looks at Communism” and distributed it to JBS chapters across the country. That pamphlet makes a variety of hysterical claims against unions, including:

Labor Unions have long been a Communist goal. How far they have been penetrated by Communists I have no idea, but it must be very far indeed, judging the hatred andvenom poured out in some labor papers….

Koch also accused the U.S. Supreme Court under former Gov. Earl Warren (R-CA) of issuing pro-Communist decisions, the universities of having thousands of Communist professors, the United Nations of being subversive, and former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on Communism.

Similar sentiments were expressed in numerous other publications the JBS also pushed. The organization pitched a screed against the union workers who organized against Kohler fixtures in Wisconsin. It pushed attacks on the UAW’s Walter Reuther, who was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It published and peddled right-wing writer Rosalie Gordon’s attack on the U.S. Supreme Court for decisions enforcing collective bargaining rights as protecting the “labor-union monopoly,” along with what she called the “plague” of desegregation caused by Brown v. Board of Education.

The JBS also pushed reprints of tomes by Ludwig von Mises attacking unions as illegitimate intervenors in the “free market,” artificial inflators of wages for workers, and thieves of the profits of tycoons. It promoted F.A. Hayek’s vilification of government regulation of corporations as leading to fascism and Hilaire du Berrier’s conspiracy theories that American labor unions were supposedly using union dues to finance communist terrorist violence abroad.

Fred Koch’s son Charles urged visitors to the John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita to read copies of JBS pamphlets, including those by anti-labor writers from the Austrian School of Economics, like Mises.

Indeed, as the present author first documented for the Center for Media and Democracy, Charles Koch became active in JBS after returning home to Wichita to help with the family business. Charles was a leader and fundraiser for JBS, including underwriting its publications and national radio network, while it attacked collective bargaining and leaders of the civil rights movement such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.

CHARLES KOCH IN ACTION

Though he left JBS in 1968, Charles Koch never abandoned its core anti-union agenda and the lessons of his father’s commitment to right-to-work. He did try to shed some of the rhetoric around communist conspiracies, though of late he was painted by Koch political strategist Richard Fink as a martyr against “collectivism,” in audio obtained by the Undercurrent, which also included outlandish claims linking fascism and the minimum wage.

It was Charles Koch’s investment in lifting up the work of Mises and Hayek, who made similar claims, that helped preserve and extend their legacy. As Stephen Moore noted in a 2006 profile on Charles for the Wall Street Journal:

The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy include, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.

Charles brought Mises to Wichita to speak and deployed F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to promote Mises and his protégé Hayek. As lauded by Reed’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Hayek argued that unions violated the very idea of the “rule of law” and that the Wagner Act was central to that violation, a sentiment he promoted in numerous writings.

Charles Koch is deeply devoted to an alternative universe in which collective bargaining undermines the rule of law and is not a major cause of increased wages.Moore noted in his interview:

As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 Why Wages Rise. The book demonstrates ‘that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains — people get more money when they produce more value for other people.’ Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’'”

Koch has also supported the NRTWC, which “sought to put a new face on the anti-union campaign by building its rhetoric on the arguments of Hayek, Mises, and others with a ‘respectable’ pedigree.” The NRTWC argues that:

Compulsory unionism itself violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced union tribute is spent. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. von Hayek wrote: “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise … is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.

Deep Devotion and Investment

Hayek and Mises are not the only two virulently anti-union economists Charles Koch backed. As Nancy MacLean documented in Democracy in Chains, one of the key architects of the Koch agenda domestically and internationally,James Buchanan, also railed against the so-called “union monopolies” for distorting “free market” wages.

And, as UnKoch My Campus has detailed, Koch money has funded scores of academics to push their agenda at universities, buying control over content and personnel with restrictive dictates attached to their donations.

Many of the rightwing groups Charles Koch is known to have made a major investment in since the 1970s have pushed right-to-work or attacked collective bargaining rights. These include Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network and many more.

During David Koch’s 1980 bid to become vice president, running on the ticket of Libertarian Ed Clark—which was pushed by Charles and fueled with Koch cash—the campaign platform included making right-to-work the law of the land:

[W]e urge repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right to Work Laws, which prohibit employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government back-to-work orders as imposing a form of forced labor.

That is, there would be no need for state right-to-work laws if there were no NLRA that protects collective bargaining rights. As a result, right-to-work would be effectively nationalized at the determination of the employer.

After badly losing that election, the Kochs have invested heavily in changing the culture—and courts of America—to make their anti-union vision a reality.

Right-to-work is part of that vision.

MILLIONS SPENT

A leak of the Kochs’ summer retreat in 2010 revealed that they featured NRTWC leaders at their gathering of billionaires to plot plans for that year’s midterm elections.

In 2012, before most of America even knew that the Kochs had branded their billionaire conclave as “Freedom Partners,” that group injected $1 million directly into the NRTWC among the more than $200 million of its known spending that cycle.

In 2016, they focused much of their known political spending on keeping a GOP majority in the Senate, and they influenced the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court by helping to block Judge Merrick Garland’s confirmation.

For the 2018 election, they’ve pledged to spend more than $400 million through the Seminar Network, the latest rebranding of their network of tycoons.

To be clear, the Koch family fortune is not the only one that has been expended pushing right-to-work laws to try to weaken the power of ordinary people to negotiate through unions. A major funder of right-to-work effort has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones has dubbed “the ATM” of the right wing.

Collective bargaining has provided women with greater economic opportunities and job security. Right-to-work laws also have a disproportionate impact on people of color, who are union members at a higher rate than whites. Black women will likely be the group most adversely affected by the Janus case. Notably, workers in right-to-work states also have lower wages than in states that have rejected this agenda.

UNDERMINING PROGRESSIVES TOO

The spread of right to work through Janusalso will affect our elections.

As In These Times has documented with the Center for Media and Democracy,the national push for right-to-work is designed to undermine the power of unions and to “defang and defund” them as a way to weaken the chances for progressives to win in politics and policy.

The Koch investment in making right-to-work a national reality represents one of the longest and deepest commitments to this agenda, aside from NRTWC itself.

And this year marks the 60th anniversary of Fred Koch’s victory of making right-to-work legally binding in Kansas.

Now, six decades later, Charles Koch has helped make his father’s wish binding on the rest of America through helping to make the Janusruling a reality.

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Lisa Graves