The labor leader’s impact spread further than contract negotiations and worker organization.

I was born on Labor Day. My mother reminds me about it every year, that it was a hot day and a lot of work to bring me into the world.

My birthplace happened to be both the country’s industrial heartland and the center of its great labor movement, Michigan, where never before had the efforts of men and women been harnessed into such mass industry, creating great cars, colossal companies and unimaginable wealth.

Walter Reuther and his United Auto Workers had a lot to do with this mass production miracle. Reuther elevated the rights of workers and their complex relationship with company owners into a national dialogue and provided workers a sense of participation and common purpose, which steeled them to the hot, dirty, noisy and monotonous working conditions and made them the most productive workers on the face of the earth.

Some think Henry Ford was enlightened when he first paid his workers the unimaginable sum of $5 a day. In reality, the working conditions were so horrible that Ford had to raise wages simply to stop everyone from quitting. Little thought was given to actually improving working conditions or hearing his workers’ grievances.

While Ford may have been a manufacturing genius, he did not know how to motivate the workers needed to man his assembly line. For this, he would need Walter Reuther, but Ford would first order his security goons to literally bloody and break Reuther and other union organizers when they tried to hand out union information at the Rouge gates.

It would take years, sit down strikes, and blood shed – Reuther and his brother survived shotgun attempts on their lives – before the UAW and management arrived at an uneasy consensus of worker discipline in exchange for better pay and benefits.

Americans have grown cynical about labor unions, seeing them as a threat to the country’s productivity and its competitive position, but it is important to acknowledge that only in this country, and particularly in the industrial Midwest, did we achieve something unique – the highest standard of living for the greatest number of people in the world.

Industrial America didn’t accomplish this widespread high standard of living in spite of the unions, but because of them and their dynamic leadership. Unions replaced the small-time dictatorship of the factory foreman with a democratic system of shop government where shop stewards had clout to negotiate worker grievances.

Reuther provided a moral voice, a political force that promoted dignity on the job for everyone, and he believed that the social and economic impact of unions should expand beyond its own membership.

Brilliant labor leadership with complete integrity, not found in abundance in today’s unions, can act as a valuable counterweight to the CEO excesses demonstrated not just by Worldcom, Tyco and Enron, but by the more common outlandish pay packages handed out to many chief executives today, packages having little to do with executive accomplishment and benefiting neither the company’s employees nor its stock holders. Reuther would have surely attacked the excesses of of executive compensation and the failure of corporate boards.

Raised by a steel mill worker in Wheeling, W.Va., Reuther lost a big toe in an industrial accident, but this never slowed him. He moved to Detroit, went to college at night, and became a die shop foreman at Ford’s Rouge plant, but he didn’t forget his father’s early teachings on workers rights and social justice. He soon began organizing autoworkers. He later transcended the role of union organizer. He became an advisor to presidents, an environmentalist and a gifted speaker, attracting 8,500 when he spoke at Berkley.

He was also an innovator. A year before America’s entry into World War II, Reuther presented a plan to the Roosevelt administration to use the slack manufacturing capacity of the auto industry in a country still wracked by depression to build war armaments for Roosevelt’s Arsenal of Democracy. His idea received a rough reception.

The “Reuther Plan” was rejected, but many parts of it were put into place a year later. During the war, he served with the War Manpower Commission and the War Production Board and he and his union men were responsible for many innovations that increased production.

After the war, Reuther advocated using the country’s vast, modern aircraft manufacturing facilities, and those workers displaced by the end of war-time production, to build manufactured housing to solve a critical housing shortage and rebuild inner city slums. The plan failed to win acceptance; the manufacturing facilities went dark; unemployment rose, and the slums were left to burn during the riots of the 60s.

Reuther was an early champion of civil rights, frequently mentioned as a gubernatorial and presidential candidate, and, for a time, was both president of the UAW and the Congress of Industrial Organizations; he refused any compensation for the second position.

His words and ideas are so powerful that Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

Reuther is not without detractors. Some say he concentrated too much power in the UAW’s central offices – necessary to maintain rank and file discipline and make collective bargaining possible. Others say he was a hypocrite, publicly championing civil rights but moving slowly in integrating the UAW’s own executive board.

Security analysts say the legacy of rich pensions he won for his workers make it impossible for the U.S. auto industry to be competitive. But doesn’t management, with its own legacy of stupendous severance and pension packages, disastrous record of quality engineering, poor product design, and expensive and illogical foreign acquisitions deserve more of the blame?

Moreover, Reuther knew long ago that keeping U.S. labor costs competitive was a complex issue the country had to address not in the way U.S. executives have, by simply moving production off shore, but by seeking a fair playing field for U.S. workers.

While UAW membership in the United States has fallen over the last two decades, it has doubled in Canada where production costs are lower because of a weaker currency and the shifting of health care costs from the employer to the state.

Reuther’s most timely legacy is that he didn’t use his power, influence and many skills to amass a personal fortune. He once turned down a raise and was proud that he was the lowest paid of any major union head. The Senate’s McClellan Commission investigators found Reuther’s family accounts to be clean and uncomplicated. This is not to say that Reuther believed in a classless society; he was however insistent that everyone share in the fruit of advancing technology. Personally, instead of money, his goal was humanitarian.

It isn’t often that I get to drive on Detroit’s Walter Reuther Expressway, but the next time I do, I’ll tip my hat to him. Maybe if WorldCom had been unionized and Reuther was the president, Bernie Ebbers would have thought twice before intimidating his workers into falsifying its financial statements. Dennis Koslowski certainly would hear Reuther’s voice while he contemplated looting Tyco’s cash for his personal benefit.

This Labor Day, I’ll think of Walter Reuther and the problems with corporate governance; he’d know what to say.

Tim Michalak majored in English at Dartmouth, while working summers in a union shop in Michigan. He has lived in Maine for 25 years and is married with three children. He is a past president of the Maine chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

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