When UAW president Walter Reuther signed a five-year contract with Ford on September 4, 1950, over the vehement and united opposition of Local 600's leadership, it was identical in substance to the five-year GM contract he had negotiated and signed in complete secrecy four months earlier, making organized capital's spokesmen both incredulous and ecstatic. Business Week extolled the GM settlement as “industrial statesmanship of a very high order,” and Fortune famously dubbed it “The Treaty of Detroit.” Reuther declared that the 1950 settlement represented “the most significant development in labor relations since the mass production industries were organized,” although it is questionable whether he really understood or intended what its real historical significance was. For the “Treaty” signaled, and not only for the big automobile corporations and the UAW, “a great political settlement,” a class accord ending nearly two decades of workers' insurgency, self-organization, and open class warfare. The accord came in the immediate wake of Reuther's defeat of the UAW's center–left coalition and his ensuing purge of Communists and their allies from positions of responsibility and trust in key UAW locals as well as from the international itself (although he still had and would have, for years to come, the recalcitrant and powerful Red Local 600 to reckon with).

Two years earlier, in the battle over the 1948 contract, General Motors had already launched an offensive – over a union principle as basic as seniority – to halt what a GM executive termed “the tendency of watering down management's responsibility to manage the business.”