Labor Loses a Longtime Champion
By John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press
Feb. 25–Douglas Fraser, a Detroit sit-down striker in the 1930s, UAW president in the 1970s and ’80s who played a key role in helping Chrysler survive, and a senior statesman of the union movement for the past quarter-century, has died at age 91.
Fraser died late Saturday at Providence Hospital in Southfield, his wife, Winnie, said Sunday; the cause of death wasn’t immediately known. To the end, he remained upbeat and outgoing, with an ease of manner that led everyone, highborn and low, to call him Doug.
“Everybody thought he was wonderful,” Winnie Fraser said. “He was a good guy, and he really was” wonderful.
Current UAW President Ron Gettelfinger mourned the loss.
“Doug was a friend, a mentor and a counselor to so many within the UAW and the larger labor movement,” Gettelfinger said. “His integrity and his enduring commitment to protecting the rights of workers will continue to inspire us.”
Fraser had suffered from emphysema for many years, seldom traveling without an oxygen tank nearby. But even into his 90s, he battled for the rights of working people.
Just last year, he spoke passionately during a Free Press interview about the state of unionized workers in America.
“Size alone I don’t think is the only measurement for a labor union,” Fraser said then. “It’s vitality. Your resources are more limited, but it’s how you spend those resources. If you spend them on communications and organization and political activity, you can be a very viable force with a much smaller number than we had in the past.
“I think if you ask anybody, the UAW is still pretty potent on the political scene, on the legislative scene.”
As a top UAW official, he helped win such benefits as comprehensive health care and improved working conditions. But he often said that Gettelfinger has a much tougher job today than he did during his tenure as president.
Gettelfinger, Fraser would say, must deal with the structural downsizing of the Detroit Three and permanent loss of jobs, while Fraser and other UAW presidents mostly had to deal with cyclical ups and downs.
But Fraser, too, led the UAW through a period of landmark transition. His greatest challenge arose in 1979 when the Chrysler Corp. faced near-bankruptcy. Then-Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca got the public acclaim, but insiders knew that Fraser, along with Sen. Donald Riegle and Rep. James Blanchard, lobbied Congress and President Jimmy Carter in support of $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for Chrysler.
Current Lt. Gov. John Cherry said Fraser’s work to secure the guarantee stands out more than perhaps any of his other contributions.
It was a difficult time, fraught with anxiety. Fraser negotiated new contracts with the corporation, and three times within 14 months, he persuaded UAW workers to grant wage and benefit concessions to the company.
As part of the effort that saved Chrysler, Fraser was named a member of the Chrysler board of directors in 1980, making him the first major union chief on the board of a large corporation. He donated his board salary to Wayne State University in Detroit.
A lifelong Democrat, Fraser proudly called himself a liberal. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. He supported school busing to achieve racial integration, a position strongly opposed by many of his fellow UAW members. He pushed an often reluctant UAW and the Big Three to recruit more minorities and women.
“He worked to better the lives of all Americans on matters of great importance — health, working conditions, jobs, education and quality of life,” U.S. Rep. John Dingell, a Dearborn Democrat, said.
When Fraser retired from the UAW in 1983, he began a second career as a distinguished university professor of labor studies at Wayne State University. He lectured at Harvard and other universities, and gave frequent interviews to the news media.
Joe Laymon, Ford Motor Co.’s group vice president for human resources and labor affairs, said Fraser’s death is a loss to management as well as labor.
Laymon got to know Fraser in the ’90s, when they were on a labor-management panel together in the Soviet Union, helping authorities there establish economic practices. Laymon worked for Xerox at the time, and when he was recruited by Ford years later, he consulted with Fraser.
“He was instrumental in my decision to join Ford,” Laymon said.
Fraser’s life mirrored Detroit’s tumultuous 20th Century. Born in a working-class neighborhood of Glasgow, Scotland, on Dec. 16, 1916, Fraser and his family immigrated to America when he was 6.
His father, a unionized electrician, found work in Detroit. Fraser dropped out of school to work in a machine shop in Detroit’s west side. From his earliest days, he was eager to organize his fellow workers, and he got fired from his first two jobs for union work.
Finding a job as a conveyor loader and later a metal finisher at a DeSoto plant, Fraser took part in the sit-down strikes that swept the industrial heartland during the Depression. The strikes were called “sit-downs” because thousands of workers took over plants and refused to leave until companies agreed to bargain.
He joined UAW Local Union 227, and in 1943, he was elected to the first of three terms as local president.
In 1950, his performance as a negotiator during the historic 104-day strike against Chrysler attracted the attention of legendary UAW President Walter Reuther, who asked Fraser to be his administrative assistant.
Although the UAW has failed to organize Japanese-owned auto plants built in the United States, Fraser never gave up hope that they would.
“They scare the hell out of workers,” he said of the so-called transplants. “And if we had a labor law that allowed the workers to make a decision” to join a union just by signing a membership card, “I think we’d organize even them.”
Fraser has two daughters from his first marriage, Judith Yonish and Jeanne Fraser, and his wife has two daughters from her first marriage, Barbara Mackenzie and Sandy Bryner.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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