April 30, 2009
I’d love to get into a deep, footnoted essay here about my thoughts on the UAW and this morning’s news about Chrysler, but I have 160 pages to galley-proof today. Instead, I’ll post a link to the most amazing book about Detroit—not just the city, but the auto plants, the labor union movement, and race relations all interwined as they should be because that’s the reality of the story here—the classic Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. The passages about Detroit police misconduct and events leading up to Coleman Young’s election are particularly brutal and fascinating, but Dan Georgakas’s and Marvin Surkin’s book mostly focuses on the fabulously Pantherish-sounding League of Revolutionary Black Workers as well as a renegade UAW unit at Dodge Main known as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or DRUM, whose mission is summarized here in some delightfully ardent prose by a writer for the South End. My personal opinion on organized labor? I owe everything I am today to my father’s UAW card (GM Tech Center, Skilled Trades UAW Local 160!) and the AFSCME/Teamsters that my mom belonged to as a state employee for 34 years. And by everything I mean the roof over my head when I was growing up, the top-notch health care I enjoyed until age 24, and the chance to go to college. Let the unions get a stake in the Big Three—they can’t do any worse a job than the past generation of executive leadership.

I’d love to get into a deep, footnoted essay here about my thoughts on the UAW and this morning’s news about Chrysler, but I have 160 pages to galley-proof today. Instead, I’ll post a link to the most amazing book about Detroit—not just the city, but the auto plants, the labor union movement, and race relations all interwined as they should be because that’s the reality of the story here—the classic Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. The passages about Detroit police misconduct and events leading up to Coleman Young’s election are particularly brutal and fascinating, but Dan Georgakas’s and Marvin Surkin’s book mostly focuses on the fabulously Pantherish-sounding League of Revolutionary Black Workers as well as a renegade UAW unit at Dodge Main known as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or DRUM, whose mission is summarized here in some delightfully ardent prose by a writer for the South End.

My personal opinion on organized labor? I owe everything I am today to my father’s UAW card (GM Tech Center, Skilled Trades UAW Local 160!) and the AFSCME/Teamsters that my mom belonged to as a state employee for 34 years. And by everything I mean the roof over my head when I was growing up, the top-notch health care I enjoyed until age 24, and the chance to go to college. Let the unions get a stake in the Big Three—they can’t do any worse a job than the past generation of executive leadership.

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  1. carolinacosmina posted this