Bull in the Heather / Silver Rocket/Skip Tracer

Reuther and his supporters consciously politicized the GM strike by challenging managerial control of product pricing and by emphasizing the stake the consuming public had in the victory of the auto workers. The neo-Trotskyist demand that the corporation "open the books" to demonstrate its "ability to pay" boldly asserted the social character of business enterprise and questioned management's prerogatives in determining the relative distribution of its profits. A wholesale effort to raise working-class purchasing power in order to take advantage of the enormous increase in the industry's wartime productive capacity, the GM strike represented the powerful cutting edge of the advanced program of Keynsian social planning that the CIO had advocated since the early years of the war. Although not directly anti-capitalist, the UAW demand raised, if only implicitly, fundamental issues of capitalist social relations.

- from Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II.