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Bean Soup & Cornbread in the Winter of Our Discontent
February 11th—An Important Anniversary for Labor
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.
• • •
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?
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