PUBLIC REVIEW BOARD
Panel ensures ‘robust and vibrant’ democracy
Ted St. Antoine’s trajectory to the labor movement was far from a straight line.
After watching his businessman dad lose his radio station and music store in the Depression, he says, “I promised myself I would be a lawyer and go to Wall Street and make $100,000 a year.”
That took him to Fordham University in New York City where one of the Jesuit priests lined up speeches by UAW President Walter P. Reuther, two popes and the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The force of Reuther’s words “was a lightning bolt,” he says, noting wryly that the head of the Chamber “had a somewhat different view.”
St. Antoine did end up becoming a lawyer but not on Wall Street. He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1965 and has devoted his career to social and worker justice. He is the retired dean of the law school.
Among other things, that earned him an appointment by then-President Leonard Woodcock to the UAW Public Review Board, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
The PRB was established in 1957 by delegates to the 16th Constitutional Convention. Its seven members – nationally recognized experts in ethics, labor law and labor-management relations – provide UAW members with a final court of appeals on issues and disputes from grievances, election protests and any action or inaction by union officials or representatives.
The UAW was the first union to establish an independent tribunal, and though others have attempted it, St. Antoine believes it is the only such board in the labor movement today.
Reuther pointed out at its inception that the PRB “was not born of necessity.” He told delegates at that 1957 convention to be “mindful of the fact that this is not window dressing. There are no constitutional loopholes. This is not the creation of a public board of apology.”
With that mandate, the members meet about a half-dozen times a year in person and do conference calls the rest of the time. They hear about 40 cases a year.
St. Antoine’s fellow board members are Benjamin Aaron, University of California emeritus professor of law; professor Janice Bellace, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; professor James Brudney, Ohio State University College of Law; James Jones, emeritus professor of labor law and industrial relations, University of Wisconsin; professor Maria Ontiveros, University of San Francisco School of Law, and Harry Katz, dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.
In his more than 30 years on the PRB, St. Antoine says, “I can’t put my finger on a single case in which there was nefarious conduct by the leadership. There are the kind of errors you find in any large organization, not the kinds of things that shock the conscience.”
“One of the wonderful things,” he adds, “is the union that least needs an independent review board is the one that has it.”
Single copies of the PRB annual report (publication #1391) are available upon request to UAW members for $1 from the UAW Purchasing Department, 8000 E. Jefferson Ave., Detroit, MI 48214.
