February 11: an important labor anniversary

Label Flash

UAW families mark the anniversary of  the Treaty of Detroit with meals of bean  soup and cornbread on February 11th.  Here’s why:

When workers at the Fisher body  plant in Flint, Michigan executed  their historic sit down strike  71 years ago they sparked a dramatic  growth in the U.S. labor movement, taking  a stand against the industrial tyranny that  then prevailed in America’s manufacturing  plants, conditions that suppressed wages  and controlled every movement of workers  on the shop floor. Within weeks after  the Treaty of Detroit was signed on February  11, 1937 to end the strike, the UAW’s  membership had grown from 30,000 to  500,000.

Strikers took over the Flint plant on  December 30, 1936. They held out for six  weeks against tear gas and the menacing  guns of National Guard troops; ignoring  an injunction issued by a judge whose  investment portfolio included $200,000  in GM stock. The workers slept on boards  stretched across boxes. They went for long  stretches without sanitation (the company  cut off water to the plant until the city of  Flint forced them to turn it back on). During  the stalemate family members provided  sustenance of bean soup, cornbread and  apples, handing the food through broken  plant windows.

The United Auto Workers union has  been pummeled in Congress and in some  segments of the press recently. When  lawmakers took up the issue of a bridge  loan to revive the U.S. auto industry late  last year, the UAW got more criticism than  auto industry management. The drumbeat  has continued even as the new Congress  revisits the idea of an economic stimulus.  We still see critics, led by Republican  members of Congress, condemning UAW  members specifically and the labor movement  in general for representing “narrow”  interests.

There are also some powerful voices  reminding us that if not for the UAW specifically  and America’s unions, America’s  middle class would be an anemic sliver of  the population.

The middle class that emerged from  the Treaty of Detroit created the impetus  for much of America’s social and economic  progress into the 20th Century.  As Washington Post columnist Harold  Meyerson noted last month, the UAW  and its then-president Walter Reuther  provided financial backing, moral support  and active involvement to the Civil Rights  movement of the 60s. Reuther and the  UAW stood shoulder to shoulder with Cesar  Chavez and the United Farmworkers  in their struggle. The UAW and Reuther  helped create the National Organization  of Women, funded the first Earth Day and  became the first and most prominent proponent  of national health care reform.  Meyerson also pointed to a little-known  effort by the UAW in 1949, calling on  automakers to pioneer small, fuel efficient  cars. That year the union issued a pamphlet  entitled: “A Small Car for the Future,”  but that suggestion was rejected out  of hand by auto company executives as  was the recurrent effort by the UAW to get  representation on corporate boards. (Recall,  if you will, the lament by Reuther’s  contemporary, then Machinists President  Floyd “Red” Smith, who, after he was  invited to negotiate concessions with a  bankrupt corporation, “Once, just once,  I’d like to be invited into the boardroom of  a going concern.”

“In a broad sense, [Republicans] want  to destroy the institution that did more  than any other to raise American living  standards, and they want to do it by using  the power of government to lower American  living standards—in the middle of the  most severe recession since the 1930s.  The auto workers deserve better, and so  does the nation they did so much to build,”
Meyerson wrote.

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So, as this new Winter of Our Discontent  continues to grip the nation—let’s take  a solidarity stand with our brothers and  sisters of the UAW. Anyone up for bean  soup and cornbread?

This originally appeared in Label Flash a publication of brought of the Union Label & Service Trades Department (AFL-CIO).