A Hawaiian shirt branded with union logos that wouldn’t look out of place on a hypebeast runway. Political cartoons roasting Ronald Reagan’s anti-labor policies. Rusty weapons recovered from violent strikes. All of that and more can be found in the Reuther archives, an exhaustive repository of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union’s artifacts from a century of strikes.
The US is in the midst of the first strike by workers at all the big three car companies of Detroit in 80 years. It’s been a galvanizing moment for autoworkers, with Joe Biden making a historic visit to the picket line.
But Gavin Strassel, an archivist at Wayne State University’s Walter P Reuther Library who catalogues UAW history, says he’s seen it all before. “There are certain things that unions bargain for, and maybe the details change, but overall it stays the same.”
One might expect to find plenty of leaflets and union publications in the archives. But there are hidden gems, too: one of Strassel’s favorite artifacts is a UAW-produced board game called Union Power. It’s a take on Monopoly, featuring dark humor about bad bosses and structural racism at work. From the instructions: “If you roll a six, that means you’re a non-white teenager with a 25% unemployment rate, start two turns after everyone else.” Roll a five, and you’re a woman – you have to wait one turn after everyone else.
The game comes from an unprocessed collection of items, but Strassel guesses it was made by the UAW’s education department. “Social gatherings are such a big part of union locals, and I can imagine workers playing this together,” he said.
The pieces in the archive do more than simply show what it was like to be a UAW member. Some of the items reflect the history of other 20th-century progressive movements. For many members, joining the labor movement was the first step to becoming activists for causes such as civil rights and women’s liberation.
The library is named after the 20th-century labor leader and civil rights activist who ran the union from 1946 until his death in 1970. During his tenure, the UAW became one of the most powerful unions in the country. “A lot of people say that the American middle class as we know it was created because of the UAW during that time,” Strassel said.
“Beyond those bread-and-butter issues for workers, Reuther was also the biggest proponent of social unionism during his time, which is the belief that unions need to do more than work for higher wages – they need to improve things for greater society, too,” he said.
A photo book in the archive shows the clash between Henry Ford’s strikebreakers, known for roughing up workers, and organizers. The guards surround UAW members from all sides, kicking and punching them, and also attacking a women’s auxiliary group. “The incident really shattered some myths about the public’s perception of Ford,” Strassel said. Historians credit a surge in support for unions to the publication of these photos.
To underscore the dangerous nature of early UAW organizing, the archive also contains a small arsenal of weapons used in clashes between strikebreakers and workers defending themselves. One wooden blackjack taken from a strikebreaker in 1940 appears to be crafted from a piece of furniture, perhaps a chair leg. A large club was made with thick leather strips, probably taken from assembly line scraps used to make car seats.
“These weapons were made with spare parts from around the factory,” Strassel said. “There’s a good weight to the blackjack, so it would have hurt a little bit more than you might expect.”
Reuther campaigned for civil rights at the 1963 March on Washington, counted Martin Luther King Jr as a friend, and campaigned for passing of the Civil Rights Act. A bright yellow jacket stamped with the United Farm Workers’ Aztec eagle insignia, given to Reuther by Cesar Chavez, reveals the allegiance between the two leaders.
Though not all rank-and-file UAW members may have been as accepting, union publications call for solidarity among different races and sexes. One cartoon from a 1960 political ad in Solidarity magazine encouraged members to vote Democratic to advance civil rights legislation. In the image, the Statue of Liberty stands next to a hooded Klansman, asking: “Which do you choose, liberty or bigotry?”
A woman’s role in the UAW began with auxiliary groups, where female family members showed their support for male relatives working in plants. One massive recruitment poster from 1935 reads: “A union man has a happy life when he’s got a union wife.” Woody Guthrie later added that slogan to Union Maid, which he wrote in 1940 to include the female perspective in his labor songbook.
But ladies’ groups weren’t sewing circles. During the 1936 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, where General Motors workers took over the plant during the UAW’s first successful strike, women guarded the doors. They used pots and pans to deter strikebreakers, Strassel said, “putting their lives on the line, even though they weren’t officially in the union”.
The current UAW president, Shawn Fain, keeps re-creations of vintage labor posters in his office. The originals are housed in the Reuther archive. One of the banners quotes a Reuther saying that calls for pensions: “Too old to work, too young to die.”
The line remains relevant, as one of the UAW’s current demands is for auto companies to bring back pensions for new employees. (Workers hired after 2008 have received 401(k) retirement plans instead of pensions.) For Strassel, the messaging is a connection between past and present.
“It’s interesting to see how relevant the content in our records is, even though some of it happened almost 100 years ago,” he said. “It still speaks to what we see today.”
