I don’t know how many of your media outlets carried the news that Doug Fraser, former UAW president, died Saturday night. From the Detroit Free Press:

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.

    And…

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.

    And…

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."

   He was also 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.

    The bolded addition was mine–interesting…a labor leader willing to stake out a moral position opposed by many of the members. Generally, reading the obit made me think of the lack of current labor leaders who try to think beyond their own union’s narrow interests and seek to have a broad vision of the labor movement’s role. Whether you agreed with Fraser’s decisions, particularly his decision to work with auto companies in the 1970s and agree to wage concessions, he undeniably had a bigger picture in mind.