‘Video Presentation- When the U.A.W. Came to Town: A Labor History of Willow Run in World War Two’ by Matt Siegfried.

Historian Matt Siegfried, your host here at the Newsstand, details how the UAW-CIO came to Michigan’s Washtenaw County, an open-shop conservative county west of Detroit, at the end of the Great Depression organizing the largest factory in the world at the time. Through a victory at Ford in April, 1941, partly led by radical Black trade unionists, Communists, and Socialists, the workers at Willow Run built UAW Local 50, with 50,000, members becoming among the most progressive unions in the country. Their struggle became a civil rights as well as labor fight and transformed the social landscape of Michigan, bettering the lives of tens of thousands of people.

We dispel some myths about the “Arsenal of Democracy” as we examine the housing crisis, racism, resistance to unions, and the expendable treatment of thousands of workers. We will look at the role of the labor movement, including Socialists and Communists, in confronting multiple war time crises; including divisions over the no strike pledge that would split the union. From the rights of women workers to the struggle against segregation, from the fight for housing and services to the campaign to keep open the plant after the war and retain jobs and the community, the activities of those years would shape our region to this day and offers and example of an expansive civil and social unionism our movement would do well to return to.