[ Fighting Times provides a vivid group portrait of the men and
women who joined with him in the day-to-day struggles to better their
own lives and to better the lives of their family members and
communities.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE AMERICAN ORGANIZER – A REVIEW OF JON MELROD’S FIGHTING TIMES:
ORGANIZING ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLASS WAR  
[[link removed]]


 

Jonah Raskin
June 2, 2022
Portside
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Fighting Times provides a vivid group portrait of the men and women
who joined with him in the day-to-day struggles to better their own
lives and to better the lives of their family members and communities.
_

Fighting Times book cover, Jonathan Melrod

 

This new memoir about years of turbulent life in American factories
brings to mind _The Organizer_
[[link removed]], a 1963 Italian
movie in which a penniless organizer, known as “the professor”,
appears in Turin at the end of the nineteenth century in response to a
plea from desperate railroad workers. 

No one in any factory called Jon Melrod “Professor,” but as a
labor history major at the University of Wisconsin, he studied the
history of working-class struggle and organization in the US. Years
later, as an in-plant organizer, he created a seven-week Labor School
designed for rank-and-file union members and shop stewards. Marcello
Mastroianni’s Professor Sinigaglia would recognize Melrod as a
comrade and as a brother-in-arms. Both were outsiders. Both became
insiders, and both changed the political battle they joined and were
in turn changed by it before they moved on. 

Melrod was an unusual organizer, which makes his story all the more
valuable. College students and members of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) who became working class organizers numbered in the
thousands. Melrod sets out to write the history of just one of them,
and his story is a valuable insight into the determination and
accomplishments of those who went into industry to continue organizing
for revolutionary change after leaving the college campus.

Melrod’s working class memoir takes place mostly in the industrial
American heartland, from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s, in the
aftermath of the Long Sixties, when people of color, students,
workers, feminists and writers the world over joined revolutionary
movements.  Melrod organized in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha,
Wisconsin, which labor journalist Steve Early describes as “the
scene of intense shop floor campaigns against racism and for militant
unionism in the auto industry.” 

Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War
[[link removed]]
By Jon Melrod
PM Press; 352 pages
Publication Date:  August 23, 2022
Paperback:  $24.95 (pre-order - save 20%)
ISBN: 9781629639659

 

PM Press
_Fighting Times_, named for the “shop paper” produced by Melrod
and his comrades, offers an unsentimental portrait of one man who gave
unstintingly of himself in the cause of labor, and nearly lost his
life because of exposure to toxic chemicals. 

“Little did I realize that the choice I made then—to take factory
jobs to organize workers in those plants get the justice they deserved
—might end up killing me decades later due to pancreatic cancer,”
Melrod writes near the start of a story in which he is almost always
at the center of the action, and yet never self-serving. 

“I had to learn not to go it alone or play the hero,“ he explains.
Still, for years he performed heroic work. “I steadily moved up in
United Auto Workers (UAW) leadership,” he explains. “I held the
positions of line steward, department chair, education committee
member, chief steward, international union delegate, and eventually
was elected to a top position on the executive board/bargaining
committee.” 

While _Fighting Times_ focuses on Melrod, it also provides a vivid
group portrait of the men and women who joined with him in the
day-to-day struggles to better their own lives and to better the lives
of their family members and communities. Bad guys aplenty also appear
in this narrative, some of them “goons and ginks and company
finks”— to borrow a phrase from Woody Guthrie’s 1940s ballad
“Union Maid” — who aimed to bust unions. Melrod’s goal was to
build a powerful fighting organization, create working class
solidarity and to use every weapon at the union’s disposal—
leaflets, newspapers, picket lines, slowdowns, strikes, buttons, and
bullhorns. Everything and anything to amplify, spread and deepen the
message and the struggle against management, among others, that
unions must be rooted in militant class struggle and be willing to
throw down to take on the bosses.

Melrod’s goals, he explains, were “unity,” “transparency,”
“militancy,” “inclusivity” and “taking up the vitally
important issues of race and sex discrimination, anti-Semitism on the
job and redneck bias.” Reading between the lines, a young organizer
in the US today would have a good idea how to operate—learn
everyone’s name and individual story, for example—and what
pitfalls to avoid, like hot headedness and the impulse to tell foes to
“fuck off” and walk away. “Better to go back in, consolidate
gains, and build on the advances.” 

“When you first go into a shop, you gotta immerse yourself in the
day-to-day lives of your fellow workers, both inside and outside the
workplace. You want to be accepted as one of the crew, work hard and
set an example as a team player. Don’t be looked at as an outsider
with a ‘message’ to deliver - no one wants to be talked down to or
lectured. Learn from others…. 

“Go to the bar after work and get to know people. Join the plant
bowling league or the softball team, organize a party or picnic and
invite your fellow workers; bring together whites, Blacks, Latinos,
and women in a social setting where the barriers of racism don’t
divide, but unite, even if only on a social level at first. An
organizer has to gain the trust and respect of others and win their
loyalty so when you go up against management, you’ve got a team on
your side.”

One topic that comes up again and again is “white skin privilege.”
Melrod explains, “When I worked in a tannery, I was the only white
guy. I could have used my white skin to secure a better job that
wasn’t as dirty or as physically punishing as the job as I was
assigned. I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t allow the company to
separate me from the other workers and them from me.” Rather, he
always saw the fight against racial prejudice as central to the
factory organizing he engaged in.

At one place where Melrod worked, the walls of the men’s bathroom
were scrawled with racist graffiti. “All the workers, white and
Black together, demanded that those walls be repainted and management
jumped to it.” On other occasions, he was called “a Commie Jew.”
After he won his first election as steward, someone spray painted,
“Melrod wears a training bra.” “Now that was creative,” he
recalls. “I wanted to meet that guy!”

Melrod has some criticism of himself as an organizer, including his
opposition to involvement in electoral politics and his decision not
to use the “levers of government” to the advantage of the union.
For years, he didn't vote. “I can see now,” he says, “that there
are ways to use local politics and electoral battles for the benefit
of the union and the working class.” What Melrod emphasizes again
and again is to be where the workers actually are, not where one would
like them to be.  “The workers watched the TV show All in the
Family, so I watched All in the Family,” he says. “I would
initiate a conversation, for example, about Archie Bunker or his
son-in-law Meathead who spent the entire show battling over racial
prejudice and backward ideas. I’d use stuff from popular culture to
get into political discussions. The conversation flowed naturally, not
like I was delivering a political lecture.”

At American Motors someone dropped toxic cleaning fluid on his head
from the fifth floor while he was handing out a flyer. “I went
running to the room where the privileged guys hung out and demanded,
‘which one of you motherfuckers dropped that shit on my head?’”
The lesson he took home from that incident was “You can’t be faint
of heart. It’s a rough-and-tumble world…. I was always on the
offensive and never backed down. I had to prove I had guts and let it
be known I was no pushover. If you want respect as an organizer, stand
your ground, even if you have to push yourself!”

Descriptions of factory work seem at times similar to the circles of
Dante’s Inferno. There’s the Crucible Steel Casting Company, which
“had earned its reputation as a tough, dirty, and dangerous place to
work,” and there’s the Pressed Steel Tank Company where he feels
“as if a thin layer of sand coated my eyeballs, and each blink
irritated my eyes. Wheezing, I blew my nose, filling the rag with dark
mucus-encrusted particles.” 

Melrod also worked as a “tannery rat” and then as a “wage
slave” at a “small plastic injection-mold factory” where he
found himself “at the bottom of a large concrete vat, rushing
frantically to clean the toxic residue of trichloroethylene (a cancer
causing chemical) used to degrease the oil on metal paint trays.” He
might as well have been back in nineteenth century Turin with
Professor Sinigaglia. 

Preceding union militancy, Melrod describes his early education, and
his role in SDS at Madison, where he read Marx and Mao. As an
undergraduate, he aligned with the local chapter’s Woody Guthrie
Collective and became an adherent of the Revolutionary Youth Movement
II (RYM II) faction, which contended with Weatherman. RYM II supported
the Black Panther Party and embraced the ideology that the working
class held the power to radically transform society with the long-term
goal of ending capitalist exploitation.  

_Fighting Times_ ends with a dramatic courtroom trial in which Melrod
was charged with libel and defamation. He and his co-defendants won.
His opponents lost. The Kenosha News ran a front-page story about that
victory that can serve as a summary of the memoir:  “As a worker,
he’s been fired for union activities. As a union activist he’s
been branded a ‘commie’… Melrod’s role in Kenosha has almost
always been to raise the dissenting voice.” Melrod himself is quoted
as saying, “Dissent has to be the lifeblood of the union movement.
Without it, it gets stale.”

If Melrod had a personal life during the time he worked in factories
and built unions, he doesn’t say. That might not matter, either.
After all, his political life was also his personal life; when
you’re an organizer, you organize. 

Over the last few decades, he has aged but he hasn’t gotten stale or
mellow. He’s still feisty and combative. After life as an organizer,
he became a lawyer and continued the struggle for justice in and out
and around courtrooms, battling for the rights of defendants and their
families who were messed over by cops and in some cases gunned down
and killed by officers of the law. Jon Melrod has almost always known
which side he’s on, going back all the way to his youth when he
recognized the American version of apartheid and joined the battle to
upend it and banish it from the land. 

In some ways, _Fighting Times_ was written for Melrod’s sons, who
often wanted to know what he did back in the day. But it was also
written for all the sons and daughters of Sixties radicals who became
union organizers, and for the people of Kenosha, who have long
protested against police brutality and who demonstrated against the
“not guilty” verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot
and killed two protesters and wounded a third in 2020. Fighting times
are our times, much as they were in nineteenth century Turin, when
organizers like Professor Sinigaglia showed up to lend their skills to
the poor, the exploited and the outraged.

_[JONAH RASKIN is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times
of Abbie Hoffman, a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and
member of the California Faculty Association.]_

To place a preorder for _Fighting Times_ from PM Press
[[link removed]] or to read
excerpts [[link removed]] before the book is released.

* 1960s
[[link removed]]
* Wisconsin
[[link removed]]
* Milwaukee
[[link removed]]
* Kenosha
[[link removed]]
* Racine
[[link removed]]
* Madison
[[link removed]]
* SDS
[[link removed]]
* Working Class
[[link removed]]
* Rank and File
[[link removed]]
* Revolutionary Union
[[link removed]]
* Maoism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]