[...]... and moved on to the Soviet Union, where they worked in an American- built auto factory in Gorky While the Reuthers admired Russia’s rapid march to modernity, they were repulsed by the brutality of Communism—an attitude that would later earn them enemies in the U.S labor movement When the brothers departed Gorky, they headed east, traversing the Soviet Union and landing in Japan before returning to the. .. Under Sloan, General Motors created a social ladder of brands, with Chevrolet at the bottom and Cadillac at the top and several rungs in between Each brand, and each model within the brand, signaled its owner’s social status to any onlooker Ford and Sloan were the two giants of the American auto industry’s formative years A mathematician might express the collective result of their work with this equation:... union lore: the Sit-down Strike, the Battle of the Running Bulls, and the Battle of the Overpass These romantic names continued to infuse the ethos of the UAW and made confrontation instead of cooperation its default mode, long after the union had gained the upper hand over the companies in the 1970s During that time the union won contracts that allowed many workers to collect pensions and enjoy free... completed high school and three years of college before landing a job at Ford, only to be red in 1932 for union activity Reuther’s response was to take a road trip He and Victor—eager to see the world and to examine rsthand the experiences of workers in other countries—took their $900 in savings and bicycled through Europe, often sleeping in youth hostels In Berlin they witnessed the Reichstag fire on... himself—prompting GM’s directors to mount an angry rebellion But it collapsed when they realized who held the purse strings and thus the power Those steps, and all the behind -the- scenes maneuvering that preceded them, were just the beginning In April the president’s people slapped down Chrysler’s creditors, which included some of the nation’s biggest and most powerful banks They forced the UAW to swallow things... chairman, giving comfort both to GM’s bankers and to the du Ponts, who were plowing their munitions pro ts from the war in Europe into buying GM shares Durant took the post of president (and CEO) into buying GM shares Durant took the post of president (and CEO) for himself and convinced Walter Chrysler to stay Over the next couple of years Durant folded Chevrolet into GM along with other companies, including... time In factory ‘H,’ located directly east of here, he began mass producing automobiles on moving assembly lines.” It was 1913, and the automobiles produced here were Model T Fords, the car that changed the world Surveying the faded glory of Highland Park, and the desperate state of Detroit’s auto industry, in the winter of 2008–09, the wealth and power of America’s car companies during most of the twentieth... bounced to and from the assembly line between his cycle of layo s and inverse layo s, thought the system was crazy—though, understandably, he didn’t want to walk away from such a sweet deal But if Chrysler should succumb to the crisis of 2008–2009, the latest one in the company’s roller-coaster eighty-year history, he wouldn’t have a choice As the two Youngs, father and son, watched Detroit’s meltdown and. .. twenty-five years The bottom line was that Japanese car companies broke Detroit’s corporate oligopoly in the 1970s, and then broke the UAW’s labor monopoly in car factories in the 1980s But when all seemed lost, monopoly in car factories in the 1980s But when all seemed lost, unexpected things began to happen The Big Three and the UAW began a painful process of introspection and self-reform Their e... Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, every time the Big Three and the UAW returned to prosperity, they would succumb to hubris and lapse back into their old bad habits It was like a Biblical cycle of repentance, reform, and going astray, again and again, as Detroit was repeatedly lured by the golden calves of corporate excess and union overreach The cycle reached its peak at the beginning of the new millennium, . the family driveway. It was a used Toyota, which his son had bought at college and driven home for the weekend. A father -and- son talk ensued, during which it was agreed weekend. A father -and- son. heroic— chronicle of comeback wasn’t to last. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, every time the Big Three and the UAW returned to prosperity, they would succumb to hubris and lapse back into their old bad habits gotten paid for the other half anyway. That was thanks to the Jobs Bank, a program that was started by the car companies and the UAW in the 1980s. The original intent of the Jobs Bank was to provide