Hitting the Books: Dodge, Detroit and the Revolutionary Union Movement of 1968

After decades on the decline intro, America’s labor movement is undergoing a massive renaissance with Starbucks, Amazon and Apple Store employees leading the way. Though the tech sector has only just begun basking in the newfound glow of collective bargaining rights, the automotive industry has a long been a hotbed for unionization. But the movement is not at all monolithic. In the excerpt below from her new book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, journalist Kim Kelly recalls the summer of 1968 that saw the emergence of a new, more vocal UAW faction, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, coincide with a flurry of wildcat strikes in Big Three plants across the Rust Belt.

fight like hell
Simon and Schuster

Excerpted from Fight Like Hell, published by One Signal/Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2022 by Kim Kelly.

As of 2021, the U.S. construction industry is still booming and the building trades are heavily unionized, but not all of the nation’s builders have been so lucky. The country’s manufacturing sector has declined severely since its post–World War II high point, and so has its union density. The auto industry’s shuttered factories and former jobs shipped to countries with lower wages and weaker unions have become a symbol of the waning American empire. But things weren’t always this dire. Unions once fought tooth and nail to establish a foothold in the country’s automobile plants, factories, and steel mills. When those workers were able to harness the power of collective bargaining, wages went up and working conditions improved. The American Dream, or at least, a stable middle class existence, became an achievable goal for workers without college degrees or privileged backgrounds. Many more became financially secure enough to actually purchase the products they made, boosting the economy as well as their sense of pride in their work. Those jobs were still difficult and demanding and carried physical risks, but those workers—or at least, some of those workers—could count on the union to have their back when injustice or calamity befell them.

In Detroit, those toiling on the assembly lines of the Big Three automakers—Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors—could turn to the United Auto Workers (UAW), then hailed as perhaps the most progressive “major” union in the country as it forced its way into the automotive factories of the mid-twentieth century. The UAW stood out like a sore thumb among the country’s many more conservative (and lily-white) unions, with leadership from the likes of former socialist and advocate of industrial democracy Walter Reuther and a strong history of support for the Civil Rights Movement. But to be clear, there was still much work to be done; Black representation in UAW leadership remained scarce despite its membership reaching nearly 30 percent Black in the late 1960s.

The Big Three had hired a wave of Black workers to fill their empty assembly lines during World War II, often subjecting them to the dirtiest and most dangerous tasks available and on-the-job racial discrimination. And then, of course, once white soldiers returned home and a recession set in, those same workers were the first ones sacrificed. Production picked back up in the 1960s, and Black workers were hired in large numbers once again. They grew to become a majority of the workforce in Detroit’s auto plants, but found themselves confronting the same problems as before. In factories where the union and the company had become accustomed to dealing with one another without much fuss, a culture of complacency set in and some workers began to feel that the union was more interested in keeping peace with the bosses than in fighting for its most vulnerable members. Tensions were rising, both in the factories and the world at large. By May 1968, as the struggle for Black liberation consumed the country, the memory of the 1967 Detroit riots remained fresh, and the streets of Paris were paralyzed by general strikes, a cadre of class-conscious Black activists and autoworkers saw an opportunity to press the union into action.

They called themselves DRUM—the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. DRUM was founded in the wake of a wildcat strike at Dodge’s Detroit plant, staffed by a handful of Black revolutionaries from the Black-owned, anti-capitalist Inner City Voice alternative newspaper. The ICV sprang up during the 1967 Detroit riots, published with a focus on Marxist thought and the Black liberation struggle. DRUM members boasted experience with other prominent movement groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, combining tactical knowledge with a revolutionary zeal attuned to their time and community.

General Gordon Baker, a seasoned activist and assembly worker at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant, started DRUM with a series of clandestine meetings throughout the first half of 1968. By May 2, the group had grown powerful enough to see four thousand workers walk out of Dodge Main in a wildcat strike to protest the “speed-up” conditions in the plant, which saw workers forced to produce dangerous speed and work overtime to meet impossible quotas. Over the course of just one week, the plant had increased its output 39 percent. Black workers, joined by a group of older Polish women who worked in the plant’s trim shop, shut down the plant for the day, and soon bore the brunt of management’s wrath. Of the seven workers who were fired after the strike, five were Black. Among them was Baker, who sent a searing letter to the company in response to his dismissal. “In this day and age under the brutal repression reaped from the backs of Black workers, the leadership of a wildcat strike is a badge of honor and courage,” he wrote. “You have made the decision to do battle, and that is the only decision you will make. We shall decide the arena and the time.”

DRUM led another thousands-strong wildcat strike on July 8, this time shutting down the plant for two days and drawing in a number of Arab and white workers as well. Prior to the strike, the group had printed leaflets and held rallies that attracted hundreds of workers, students, and community members, a strategy DRUM would go on to use liberally in later campaigns to gin up support and spread its revolutionary message.

Men like Baker, Kenneth Cockrel, and Mike Hamlin were the public face of DRUM, but their work would have been impossible without the work of their female comrades, whose contributions were often overlooked. Hamlin admitted as much in his book-length conversation with longtime political activist and artist Michele Gibbs, A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor. “Possibly my deepest regret,” Hamlin writes, “is that we could not curb, much less transform, the doggish behavior and chauvinist attitudes of many of the men.”

Black women in the movement persevered despite this discrimination and disrespect at work, and they also found allies in unexpected places. Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American Marxist philosopher and activist with a PhD from Bryn Mawr, met her future husband James Boggs in Detroit after moving there in 1953. She and James, a Black activist, author (1963’s The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook), and Chrysler autoworker, became fixtures in Detroit’s Black radical circles. They naturally fell in with the DRUM cadre, and Grace fit perfectly when Hamlin organized a DRUM-sponsored book club discussion forum in order to draw in progressive white and more moderate Black sympathizers. Interest in the Marxist book club was unexpectedly robust, and it grew to more than eight hundred members in its first year. Grace stepped in to help lead its discussion groups, and allowed young activists to visit her and James at their apartment and talk through thorny philosophical and political questions until the wee hours. She would go on to become one of the nation’s most respected Marxist political intellectuals and a lifelong activist for workers’ rights, feminism, Black liberation, and Asian American issues. As she told an interviewer prior to her death in 2015 at the age of one hundred, “People who recognize that the world is always being created anew, and we’re the ones that have to do it — they make revolutions.”

Further inside the DRUM orbit, Helen Jones, a printer, was the force behind the creation and distribution of their leaflets and publications. Women like Paula Hankins, Rachel Bishop, and Edna Ewell Watson, a nurse and confidant of Marxist scholar and former Black Panther Angela Davis, undertook their own labor organizing projects. In one case, the trio led a union drive among local hospital workers in the DRUM faction, hoping to carve out a place for female leadership within their movement. But ultimately, these expansion plans were dropped due to a lack of full support within DRUM. “Many of the male leaders acted as if women were sexual commodities, mindless, emotionally unstable, or invisible,” Edna Watson later told Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin for their Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. She claimed the organization held a traditionalist Black patriarchal view of women, in which they were expected to center and support their male counterparts’ needs at the expense of their own agenda. “There was no lack of roles for women… as long as they accepted subordination and invisibility.”

By 1969, the movement had spread to multiple other plants in the city, birthing groups like ELRUM (Eldon Avenue RUM), JARUM (Jefferson Avenue RUM), and outliers like UPRUM (UPS workers) and HRUM (healthcare workers). The disparate RUM groups then combined forces, forming the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The new organization was to be led by the principles of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, but the league was never an ideological monolith. Its seven-member executive committee could not fully cohere the different political tendencies of its board or its eighty-member deep inner control group. Most urgently, opinions diverged on what shape, if any, further growth should take.

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ has promise, and the usual frustrations

There are reasons that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds exists beyond the need to keep the Trek content pumping so nobody thinks too hard about canceling Paramount+. It’s designed to quell some of the discontent in Star Trek’s vast and vocal fanbase about the direction the live-action shows have traveled under the stewardship of uber-producer Alex Kurtzman. It’s also a slightly bewildered response to the criticism of its predecessors, Discovery and Picard, made by the same people behind those two shows. In short, it’s designed to appeal to people who, when asked what their favorite live-action Trek show is, unironically say The Orville.

We open on Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the once-and-future captain of the Enterprise after his sojourn leading Discovery in its second season. There, a magic time crystal told him that, in less than a decade, he’ll be non-fatally blown up in a training accident. Armed with a standard-issue Grief Beard™, he refuses the call to return to the stars until the siren song of non-serialized space adventure becomes too great. It isn’t long before he and Spock are reunited to rescue Rebecca Romijn’s Number One from a spy mission on a pre-warp planet gone wrong. Sadly, Paramount’s restrictive embargo on discussing the first few episodes forbids me from discussing much of what I’ve seen, so things will get vaguer from here on out.

It looks like it was August 2020 when Alex Kurtzman said that the show would be episodic rather than serialized. This was a way to address the criticism of the heavily serialized, go-nowhere, do-nothing grimdark mystery box stories that sucked so much of the joy from Discovery and Picard. Strange New Worlds is, instead, a deliberate throwback in the style of The Original Series, albeit with serialized character stories. So while we visit a new planet each week, characters still retain the scars, and lessons learned, from their experiences.

There are more refreshed Original Series characters than just Pike, Spock and Number One along for the ride. Babs Olusanmokun is playing a more fleshed-out version of Dr. M’Benga, while Jess Bush takes over for Christine Chapel. André Dae Kim is the new Chief Kyle, who has been promoted from intermittent extra to transporter chief. Then there’s Celia Rose Gooding as Cadet Uhura, whose semi-canonical backstory is now firmly enshrined as a Dead Parent / Troubled Childhood narrative. Uhura aside, most of these roles were so under-developed in the ‘60s that they’re effectively blank slates for the reboot. Oh, except that everyone is now Hot and Horny, because this isn’t just Star Trek, it’s Star Trek that isn’t afraid to show characters in bed with other people.

Rounding out the cast is Christina Chong as security chief La’an Noonien-Singh, a descendant of Khaaaaan! himself, Trek’s in-series Hitler analog. From what we learn of her so far, she also gets saddled with a Troubled Childhood / Dead Parent narrative, as well as a case of the nasties. I expect her character will soften further over time, but right now she’s officially the least fun character to spend time with. Of more interest is Melissa Navia’s hotshot pilot Erica Ortegas who can launch the odd quip into the mix when called upon, and Hemmer. Hemmer is a telepathic Aenar (a type of Androian first introduced in Enterprise) played by Bruce Horak. Horak plays Hemmer as an old-fashioned lovable grump and mentor figure for some of the other characters and will clearly become a fan-favorite.

And having now seen the first half of the first season (a second is already in production) I can say that Strange New Worlds will be a frustrating watch for fans. Frustrating because there are the bones of a really fun, interesting Star Trek series buried deep inside Strange New Worlds. Sadly, it’s trapped in the usual mix of faux-melodrama, clanging dialogue and dodgy plotting with the usual lapses in logic. Many writers are blind to their own flaws, which is why it’s so amusing that this is what Kurtzman and co. feel is a radical departure from their own work.

Maybe I’m being unfair, but this is the seventh season of live-action Star Trek released under Kurtzman’s purview. The three lead characters all had a full season of Discovery to bed in, too, so it’s not as if everyone’s starting from cold. But despite the gentlest of starts, the show still manages to stumble out of the gate, trying to do too much and not enough at the same time. The first four episodes, especially, feel as if someone’s trying to speed-read you through a whole season’s worth of plot in a bunch of partly-disconnected episodes.

An aside: Ever since the mid ‘80s, Paramount was desperate to reboot Star Trek with a younger cast to cash-in on that Kirk/Spock brand awareness. It eventually happened, but only in 2009 with J.J. Abrams’ not-entirely-successful attempt to reboot the series in cinemas. While a Young Kirk movie made sense in the ‘80s, mining that seam for nostalgia today seems very weird indeed. After all, most people under the age of 50 will likely associate TNG as the One True Star Trek. The fact that not-so-closet Trek fan Rihanna’s favorite character is Geordi La Forge speaks volumes about where millennial love lies. But I’d imagine a La Forge spin-off series was never going to fly with any generation of Paramount executives.

Now let’s talk about that emotional continuity, because while people will take their experiences with them, little effort has been made to pre-seed conflicts before they erupt. Arguably the weakest episode of the bunch tries to cram four (4!) A-plots into its slender runtime. One of which is a coming out narrative for one crewmember – and once they’ve come out, another character reveals a deep-seated antipathy toward that group. It would be nice, if we could have let this particular battle brew, but it’s introduced about 25 minutes in and resolved with a punchfight by minute 40. We’re not shown the person wrestling with the decision to come out and risk their professional and personal relationships beforehand, either. Just… punchfight.

A lot of these episodes don’t properly resolve themselves either, which is the standard problem for any 50-minute TV show. It’s hard to build a new world, flesh out new characters, establish and resolve their problems in the space of two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But at least three episodes feature conclusions that either aren’t clear or take place entirely off screen, explained away with a line of dialogue. I don’t know if it was a production problem, or if a majority of the show’s 22 (yes, twenty-two) credited producers signed off on it, but it feels a hell of a lot like cheating. It’s almost as if the writers wanted to provoke surprise in the subsequent scene — how did this get resolved!? — over concocting a satisfying emotional and narrative catharsis on-screen. 

In fact, I’m going to harp on about this one particular episode because it’s not content with just dropping one major character revelation. The episode basically stops 10 minutes early in order to – shock horror – drop another Kinda Dark Secret About A Crewmember You Barely Know. One thing I said when Discovery started was that if you never get to know the characters in their default state, it’s not valuable to see their bizarro-world counterparts straight away. It’s the same here, Strange New Worlds refuses to do the painstaking work of filling in these characters before they start changing as a result of their experiences together.

The cast is all solid, and clearly working hard to elevate the material they’ve been given, because the dialogue here is so rough that I think they all deserve danger money. Now, nü-Trek dialog has always been awkward and/or impenetrable, but it’s beyond dreadful here. Kurtzman and co. forgot the whole “show, don’t tell” nature of screenwriting, and so characters just stand there and tell you everything, constantly. This is made worse because rather than giving space for these talented, well-paid actors to act, they’re instead forced to say what they’re feeling.

Here’s an example of that: In one episode, a character is trying (and failing) to remember a key memory from a traumatic experience in childhood that holds the key to saving the day. But rather than use the performer to convey that, they have the actor in question stand there, blank-faced, and say “I am trauma blocked.” Then there are scenes in which two characters describe what’s happening in front of them with the sort of faux-gravitas that only Adam West could pull off.

Remember when I said there was promise? There really is, and you feel like if the writers could get out of their own way, things could improve massively. There’s one episode you could easily describe as the (actually fun) comedy romp of the season and it’s great. Every Trek fan knows that The One With The Whales is the most financially successful Trek property ever made. And yet whenever a new Trek property is made, it’s always with the promise of more grimness, more darkness, more grit, more realism. Yet here we are, with the fun episode reminding you why you watch Star Trek in the first place, and making the characters fun people to hang out with. If the series could continue in that slightly slower, more relaxed groove, then Strange New Worlds could be brilliant.

I haven’t talked much about the production design or effects, both of which are great – this new Enterprise is gorgeous inside and out. Nor the series music, with Nami Melumad’s score being smart, subtle and lush in all of the right places. That’s a compliment not shared with Jeff Russo’s now standard fare, which neither matches the delicacy of a good prestige drama intro nor the soaring bombast associated with Star Trek. The best and worst thing I can say about the intro theme is that it sounds like it came from one of Interplay’s mid ‘90s CD-ROM games.

Fundamentally, I can only really damn Strange New Worlds with the faintest of praise – it can be fun, every now and again. I would imagine, and hope, that things will improve as time goes on, and the show’s makers won’t indulge their worst impulses. Given that I walked away from Picard after the end of its first dreary-as-hell run, the fact I’m at least prepared to stick around here speaks volumes.

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Microsoft Edge will soon include a free built-in VPN

Microsoft has consistently tried to get more people to use Edge. Some of the ways it has pursued that goal have been less well-received than others, but its latest effort to do so could make for a useful addition to the software. In a support page spotted by The Verge, the company revealed it’s adding a free built-in VPN service dubbed Edge Secure Network to its web browser. 

The company says the tool will encrypt your internet connection. You can use that functionality to protect your data from your internet service provider. As with most VPNs, you can also use Edge Secure Network to mask your location, making it possible to access services that might otherwise be blocked in the country where you live or are visiting.

If you find yourself frequently traveling, chances are Edge Secure Network won’t replace a paid VPN. The feature limits you to 1GB of data usage per month. It’s also worth noting you’ll need a Microsoft account to use the service. Microsoft has yet to begin testing the VPN. But once the feature is available, you’ll be able to enable it through Edge’s three-dots icon. A new option titled “Secure Network” will turn the VPN on. Once you’re done browsing, it will automatically turn off again.