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Did Henry Ford really fire an employee named John Gallo simply for smiling? Although the story circulated widely among Ford workers, there is no real proof it is true, at least not the kind that would stand up in court; it’s what we might now call an urban legend. But, true or not, the story,…

Rebuilding Confidence: How Workers Found the Power to Win — and How They Can Again In the depths of the Great Depression, when a quarter of American workers were jobless and unions were little more than wishful thinking, the labor movement was revived by one thing above all else: confidence. It wasn’t born out of slogans…

UAW Local 249 and the Negro Leagues In 1949, when the Kansas City Monarchs came to Ypsilanti, Michigan, to play an exhibition baseball game, Alfred “Slick” Surratt put down his tools at the Detroit auto plant where he was working and went to the ballpark. The Monarchs were widely considered to be the “New York…

It was 1936, the Great Depression. Millions were out of work. Each morning in Flint, Michigan, desperate men gathered outside the gates at General Motors in the winter cold, frantic for work and a paycheck to feed their families. The fledgling UAW represented just 25,000 of the one million autoworkers toiling in U.S. auto plants…