The state of Michigan was the location of the great auto strikes during the Great Depression years of the 1930s, and their success led to the rise of labor unions as major factors in American society and politics for the next fifty years.
But the Republican Party continued to be anti labor over those decades, and Ronald Reagan coming to the Presidency thirty years ago, ironically a labor leader himself with the Screen Actors Guild, became the beginning of a concerted attack on labor,which has continued in the states with the “Bully” Republican Governors elected in 2010.
And now, Michigan Republicans have declared war on collective bargaining, and have rammed through the legislature a “right to work” bill, which will be signed by Governor Rick Snyder, despite massive protests at the state capital in East Lansing.
Those who believe in collective bargaining and the right of labor to organize must organize and fight over the next two years, not only in Michigan, but in many other Republican states, to defeat the Governors and the reactionary members of the legislatures, in order to regain their basic human rights to decent conditions of work!