NE North Dakota News

Labor leader and UAW President Walter Reuther came to Saint Paul in 1955 to preside at the opening of the new Local 879 Union Hall on Ford Parkway. Twin Cities Ford plant workers had been issued charter #879 on July 18, 1941 by the UAW-CIO. A few weeks earlier, 900 workers had signed union membership cards, giving the needed majority to create the chapter under the UAW national labor agreement signed in Detroit. 

Prior to the union, the Ford plant was a difficult place to work. Job security was an issue and the plant shut down for several years during the Depression. Henry Ford continued to oppose President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s and Walter Reuther’s efforts to protect workers – Ford workers could be fired without cause and risked their jobs if they attended union meetings. During WWII, as the plant was being converted from civilian production to military production, labor leaders, including Ruether, lobbied to keep auto workers employed in defense industries.  

Walter Ruether was an environmentalist, an ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, and was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Ruether, who had survived two assignation attempts, was tragically killed, along with his wife and a number of colleagues, on May 9, 1970 in plane crash north of Detroit. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 by President Bill Clinton. In spite of an attempt to keep the doors open, the Ford plant was closed in 2011.

Thank you to historians Steve Trimble and Brian McMahon for the information for this post. 

UAW President Walter Reuther (shaking hands at right) presided at the opening of the new Local 879 Union Hall on Ford Parkway, St. Paul, in 1955. Image from UAW Local 879.

Original source can be found here.