The State of the Labor Movement and the Strike Tool.

• Author: McKinley, Vern

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint and the Strike that Created the Middle Class

By Edward McClelland

232 pp.; Beacon Press, 2021

With Joe Biden as president, one of the policy areas expected to see a dramatic turnabout from Donald Trump's administration is government's relationship with organized labor. The former mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, has been tapped as the new labor secretary. Consistent with Biden's rhetoric during the campaign that he would be the "most pro-union president you've ever seen," Walsh has a strong connection with labor unions, having served as the head of the Boston Building Trades Council, a labor union.

Notwithstanding that appointment, it is unrealistic to think that there will be much of a change in a benchmark percentage cited in this new book by Edward McClelland: "[In 1983] 30 percent of factory workers were still unionized. Today, it's around 9 percent."

Antecedents / McClelland's Midnight in Vehicle City returns us to the heyday of the union movement during the late 1930s. He has multiple books to his credit, most of them historical reviews about the U.S. Midwest, including Nothin' but Blue Skies, which follows the ups and downs of America's industrial heartland, and Young Mr. Obama, which traces Barack Obama's time in the Midwest.

Midnight in Vehicle City's nearly exclusive storyline focuses on a sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich., that occurred over a six-week period during the winter of 1936-1937. This story is particularly interesting for me because my father had a union job at an oil refinery in Indiana for 40 years, joining the workforce about the time of the Flint strike.

Owing to the critical issues involved and the timing during the Depression, the dynamics of the sit-down strike were not a simple bilateral conflict between GM in Flint and its workers who initiated the strike. Beyond those two parties, McClelland introduces the reader to the Flint Alliance, an anti-strike group that represented the "silent majority of Flint residents, including Flint autoworkers"; the United Auto Workers of America (UAWA), which was a newly formed national union that had broken away from the American Federation of Labor (AFL); Franklin Roosevelt's administration, which (like the Biden administration) was seen as more labor-friendly than its predecessor; and Michigan's governor, Frank Murphy, previously mayor of Detroit, who later became Roosevelt's attorney general and then a...