Have you ever been on Strike?

[Lowell]

I have. Twice. I’d like to hear about your experiences.



Nobody wants a strike, especially workers who see their incomes reduced to subsistence-level strike benefits paid out by their union. But sometimes you have to fight so the other side knows you can, and, more importantly, that you will, regardless of the hardships.

I came to Detroit to work. I rode the Warren Crosstown bus to the Rouge and the assembly lines of the Dearborn Engine Plant where I for three summer I worked my way through college.

Thanks to becoming a UAW member, and earning three times as much as the minimum wage jobs offered in the small towns where I grew up, I left university debt-free. Meanwhile, I saw the hard-working workers around me, able to live a decent middle-class life. All of that was possible because of the power of the strike.

As you might imagine, I am very thankfully pro-union.

Later, when I ‘quit school forever’ to be an artist, I was able to endure the years of that challenge by working as a Teamster 243 Sears delivery truck driver where I saw almost every street in Detroit.

We struck twice. The second went on for three months and into the winter. Impromptu shelters were built at picket sites and we huddled around fire barrels to stay warm. Later, I would recreate the camaraderie of those nights in the above painting “One Fire at a Time”.