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 Supreme Court justice.

Ground zero / Those familiar with Flint’s recent history know about its water crisis, its dramatically shrinking population (about half of what it was in the 1960s) largely attributed to the loss of well-paying union jobs, and its high crime rate. But like many industrial Midwestern cities during the early 20th century, Flint was on the upswing of population ebbs and flows, drawing in a steady stream of willing labor adversely affected by the Farm Belt recession and the ongoing Depression.

Although Flint presented opportunities for this ready queue of workers, McClelland describes in graphic detail the difficult working conditions, including exhausting and dangerous work (primarily caused by assembly line “speed-ups”), accompanied by fluctuating and declining incomes. A GM line worker’s compensation was a black box of adjustments. Pay was regularly docked when the assembly line shut down, even if it was not the worker’s fault. As GM line worker Frank Perkins understandably complained, “We’re gettin’ sick of workin’ without knowin’ how much we made.”

Tensions began to build in late 1936 and talk of a sit-down strike began to swirl among the GM workers. McClelland explains the long history of sit-down strikes:

Laborers have been sitting down on the job to protest working conditions since the beginning of the twentieth century…. It’s more effective than walking out of a plant, because if workers abandon their machinery, the bosses can hire scabs to get it running again.

Perkins and his brother Bill decided to try the sit-down tactic after reading about such a strike ongoing at a Bendix plant in South Bend, Indiana. They were promptly fired: “When the brothers arrive for their Friday-night shift their timecards have been replaced with red cards…. A red card means termination.”

The brothers were ultimately brought back to work and were paid for their half-day sit-down strike. But the underlying issues were not resolved and the situation came to a head after UAWA organizers made a sustained push to sign up hundreds of members for the union. After being outed as members, some workers were fired.

January 1, 1937 was targeted for a sit-down strike, which not coincidentally was also the day Frank Murphy would be sworn in as governor. But pressure rose to move up the date when GM began moving metal-shaping dies out of the Flint plant. Flint produced dies critical to manufacturing auto parts used in every GM facility.

The sit-down strike was initiated on December 30, as announced by union steward Louis Strickland to the men in his department: “This here’s it. There’s a sit-down strike. Everyone is to sit right here.” Managers and plant security were evicted, women were sent home, and the strikers began welding the doors shut. GM management dug in its heels: “Such strikers are clearly trespassers and violators of the law of the land…. We cannot have bona fide collective bargaining with sit-down strikers in illegal possession of plants.”

A GM line worker’s compensation was a black box of adjustments. Pay was docked when the lines shut down, even if it was not the worker’s fault.

Within a week, GM production was cut by 75%. The Flint police and National Guard intervened but were not a major factor.

A slow, grinding narrative / The middle third of the book chronicles the tedium of the strikers’ daily routine of bringing food into the factory, reading newspapers, doing calisthenics, and listening to a band known as the Hillbilly Orchestra, which entertained the strikers. The Women’s Emergency Brigade provided support on a number of fronts.

In response, a GM employee and representative of the anti-strike Flint Alliance wrote a letter to President Roosevelt with some heated rhetoric:

I wish to call your attention to the terroristic activities of the union agitators here. These agitators are mostly outsiders with no stake in Flint and have been desperately trying to scare us workers into joining their so-called union.

Governor Murphy’s initial attempt to get the sides together was, in the words of McClelland, a “failure.” Murphy admitted that “the government must play a helpful part.” McClelland clarifies: “That means the federal government. A strike that has immobilized the nation’s most important company has turned out to be too big for a rookie governor to handle on his own.”

It would ultimately be left to the Roosevelt administration in Washington to bring the strike to an end, a scenario of interventionism that would be repeated in the labor industry in the ensuing decades. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins’ goal was to bring together GM CEO Alfred P. Sloan and John L. Lewis, leader of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which had recently split off from the AFL. Perkins became a conciliator after first trying some hardball tactics, which included asking Congress for authority to subpoena the disputants in the strike and publicly chastising GM: “However much I think General Motors have failed in their public duty I am still willing to talk to them and explain the situation.” She also brought Roosevelt into the negotiations at appropriate times to, as McClelland describes it, “nudge both GM and the union as negotiations proceed.” The final agreement was for GM to rehire all the workers regardless of their actions during the strike and to negotiate only with the UAWA for six months.

Conclusion / Up until the book’s epilogue, McClelland presents an even-handed historical review. However, the epilogue presents a disappointingly one-sided “politics of envy” summary of his conclusions about the strike and the labor–management relationship generally, with little regard for supporting facts and citations. He refers to the strike as the “battle that founded the blue-collar middle class,” a conclusory statement that is echoed in the book’s subtitle. He further laments that “American workers are back to where they were before the [Flint] strike happened,” without mentioning that the labor costs imposed by union negotiators weakened the competitiveness of union-dominated industries.

He adds overblown rhetoric for good measure:

The shrinking of the middle class is not a failure of capitalism. It’s a failure of government. Capitalism has been doing exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves.

He also takes a swipe at Ronald Reagan for taking “the side of employers rather than unions,” a reference to the 1981 air traffic controllers strike. McClelland offers nary a mention that the union’s action violated a prohibition against strikes by government employees.

McClelland concludes the book by suggesting that a sit-down strike against Amazon today would be a good start to restoring labor’s place in the economy. Obviously, this conclusion was written before Amazon workers in Bessemer, Ala. voted not to unionize their warehouse. My overall assessment of McClelland’s book is to enjoy the historical narrative but skip the epilogue.