Activity

Possibly the only group exploited more than blacks at Dodge Main was the recently immigrated Arabs. In 1968, they already numbered 500, and in the next six years that number would multiply fourfold. These workers were often totally confused by American conditions, and they were fearful of losing th…

The only weapon left to the worker was the grievance procedure. If a job was speeded up or an extra procedure added, if safety goggles or gloves were inadequate, if a machine malfunctioned, the worker could not fight it out on the factory floor in a direct confrontation with a superviser. The worke…

The difficult post-war decades had brought one tremendous advantage to the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler): a chance to counter the effects of unionism. Frightened by the radical spirit and mass actions of the late 1930s, the Big Three made a deal with the UAW after the war. Their overriding man…

Increasingly, groups of white workers have begun to voice the complaints and pursue the objectives that black workers began to voice and pursue in the late 1960s. Ideas once limited to Marxists, youth counter-culturalists, and women's liberation groups can now be found on the shop floor in myriad d…

In the pages that follow, we have attempted to relate the history of the Detroit struggle from 1967-1974, taking the activities of urban revolutionaries as our point of departure. We begin with a small core of black revolutionaries who began their political work in this period by publishing a newsp…