Tales from the Reuther Library

Sociologists Thomas Gepts and Sarah Mason, PhD, discuss the six-week strike in 2022 of 48,000 UAW-represented academic workers across all 10 University of California campuses, explaining how differing strategies and organizing tactics employed at each campus yielded contrary results: at UC Berkeley, academic workers voted largely in favor of the new contract; at UC Santa Cruz they voted largely against.

Mason and Gepts share their research demonstrating how differences in power resources at each campus let to divergent worker interpretations of the strike’s limitations and possibilities. They also discuss the archival material collected during the strike and their subsequent interviews of strikers, which have been recently donated to the Reuther Library but have not yet been opened for research. Gepts, Mason, Margaret Eby, PhD, and Elizabeth Emmott-Torres are the authors of “Organizing associational power: A strikers’ inquiry into the 2022 UAW strike against the University of California.”

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Dr. Lisa Fine explains how the working class, local unions, and sportsman’s organization collaborated throughout the twentieth century to preserve the ecosystems and waterways located Downriver, a collection of working class industrial, exurban, and rural communities south of Detroit along the Detroit River. Fine is a professor of history at Michigan State University and author of Downriver Detroit: The Working Class, the Environment, and the Bonds of Place.

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Dr. Cedric De Leon explains how, from the founding of the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919 through the 1963 March on Washington, Black workers linked racial justice to economic justice, challenging the American labor movement to become more racially inclusive in its fight for workers’ rights.

De Leon is Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity.

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Host Dan Golodner and Katrina Rouan trade quips while reflecting on the progress that has been made during her first 18 months as the director of the Reuther Library as well as the goals and challenges that lie ahead for the archives. Prior to her appointment as the Reuther’s director, Rouan coordinated reference services and graduate student assistants in the Wayne State University Library System, and served as the subject specialist librarian for the departments of psychology, communication sciences and disorders, and nutrition and food science.

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Dr. Michael Stauch explains how newly elected Detroit Mayor Coleman Young introduced “community policing” to the city in 1974, an experimental approach to law and order that included affirmative action hiring policies and neighborhood police stations to address community concerns about both police brutality and criminal activity in the neighborhoods. Despite these changes, tensions with the police remained, leading Black youth in the city to embrace labor radicalism from the shopfloors as they built informal economies and decentralized gangs to challenge and achieve political and social power in the 1970s and 1980s. Stauch is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toledo and author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing .

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Children’s book author and engineer Suzanne Slade describes the creative process she used to engage the next generation of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) with the stories of twelve women who worked behind the scenes on the Apollo lunar landing mission. Slade is the author of Women on a Mission: The Remarkable Heroes Who Put Men on the Moon.

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John Fabian Witt recounts how in the 1920s and 1930s Charles Garland donated his million-dollar inheritance to the American Fund for Public Service, or Garland Fund, to support progressive causes and organizations he believed could challenge inequality and reshape capitalism and democracy in America.

Dr. Witt is a Professor of History and the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale University and author of The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.

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Dr. Jody Baxter Noll recounts the 1968 Florida Teachers’ Strike, in which 27,000 teachers across the state, amidst a shift in Florida politics toward a pro-business and suburban “Sunshine conservatism” reluctant to raise taxes for public education, submitted their resignations to gain collective bargaining rights and improved school funding. Noll is a Lecturer in the History Department at Georgia State University and author of The 1968 Florida Teachers’ Strike: Public Sector Unionism and the Fight against Sunshine State Conservatism.

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Karen Horting, Executive Director and CEO of the Society of Women Engineers, talks about SWE’s archives at the Reuther Library and shares how the 75-year-old organization leverages its history to advocate for the inclusion of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

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Dr. Martin Hershock recounts the violent three-day strike against General Motors supplier Federal Screw Works in 1938, when women from Detroit’s Polish community led the fight to preserve both their recently-recognized union and their neighborhood. Hershock is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of the article, “Seems to Me You Have Plenty of Nerve”: Polish American Women, Detroit’s Federal Screw Works Strike of 1938, and the Fate of the UAW.”

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