Of course, as Art points out here, he was warning us about this six weeks ago, and noting that the arbitration portion was the far more radical and dangerous portion, as it will mean in practice that the government will be dictating the terms of labor contracts to every business that is forced to unionize – a level of intervention into private business practice unprecedented in U.S. history.

in the current law. About the only way out is bankruptcy.

There were attempts to unionize auto production from the beginning of mass production. Some crafts within the industry were organized early on but the assembly line was a new labor paradigm not really suited to the AFL’s craft by craft organization. Nevertheless, in 1935, the United Auto Workers were chartered within the AFL in a subgroup called the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Tensions quickly mounted between the crafts unions with their strict labor divisions and the industrial unions who wanted wall-to-wall organization of whole plants and whole industries. The AFL expelled the industrial unions who formed the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The CIO, led by the UAW immediately set its sights on wall-to-wall organization of the auto industry, which industry resisted vehemently and sometimes violently. Much of organized labor’s radical history was written in this period culminating in UAW’s sit down strikes against various auto manufacturers. When UAW struck Ford’s Flint, MI plant, the Governor of Michigan mediated the dispute and a settlement was reached recognizing the UAW.

Concurrent with both the Ford organization and Pearl Harbor, UAW set the bargaining paradigm for most War Labor Board production in which the predicates of an agreement were a no-strike pledge by the union, a no-lockout plege by the employer, and these pledges were enforced by a grievance process that ended in binding arbitration of the merits of the grievance. To the extent that it could be said that FDR “made” UAW, the fact that most War Production contracts were essentially project labor agreements recognizing a union and requiring the UAW system dramatically unionized not just autos but the whole of American industry.