[Michlib-l] Commerce Twp. Community Library Virtual Program: Midnight in Vehicle City

[Alexis Shirk]

Please feel free to share with your patrons and anyone else who might be
interested.

Join author Ted McClelland as he gives a presentation on his book Midnight
in Vehicle City.

Register here: https://commercetwp-library.libcal.com/event/12850078

The tumultuous Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936 to 1937 symbolized the start
of the United Auto Workers and set the standard for wages in every
industry. This historic transformation of the economic structure in the
U.S. ultimately established the golden age of the American middle class.
The causes for which the strikers sat down–collective bargaining, secure
retirement, better wages–enjoyed a half-century of success. But now, the
middle class is diminishing in the 21st century and economic inequality is
at its highest since the New Deal. If we want to learn how to revive it, we
need to look at how it started in the first place.

Midnight in Vehicle City is the dramatic story of how workingmen defeated a
major industrial power–General Motors, the largest corporation in the
world. Journalist and historian Edward McClelland will bring you into the
action-packed events of the strike, such as takeovers of GM plants and
violent showdowns between picketers and the police. The strikers’ victory
resulted in a new kind of America, one in which every man had a right to
the wealth his labor produced. McClelland revives the stories of the
industrial Midwest in order to examine how the labor movement has declined
as a result of changes in automation, outsourcing, and American politics.
He uses the lens of Flint, Michigan, to exemplify how one city can be the
birthplace of the middle class yet face its most rapid decline. Through new
stories of strikers and archival research, McClelland reminds readers how
shared prosperity can only be achieved through intervention and how the
legacy of the Sit-Down Strike can guide our understanding of the increasing
economic disparities in the U.S.

-- 
Alexis Shirk
Adult Services Librarian
Commerce Twp. Community Library
Phone: 248-669-8108 x121

"In principle and reality, *libraries* are life-enhancing palaces of
wonder."
-Gail Honeyman, *Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine*

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