Book Review: FIGHTING TIMES: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War by Jon Melrod

FIGHTING TIMES: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War

by Jon  Melrod

PM Press. 320 pp. Paperback, epub and PDF editions.

The PM Press blurb describing writer-activist Jon Melroad reads as follows:

Born into the political and cultural quiescence of the 1950s, Jon Melrod grew up in apartheid-like Washington DC. Active in the student movement that opposed the Vietnam War and a supporter of black liberation, Jon embraced the ideology that the working class held the power to radically transform society. He left the campus for the factory in 1973. For thirteen years, he immersed himself in the day-to-day struggles of Milwaukee’s working class, both on the factory floor and in the political arena. Despite FBI surveillance and interference, Jon organized a militant rank-and-file caucus and rose through union ranks to a top leadership position in UAW Local 72. After a mass workforce cutback imposed by AMC’s joint venture partner Renault, he left to attend Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 1985. Graduating cum laude with a JD, he opened a law firm in San Francisco, successfully representing hundreds of political refugees.

This is a good introduction to the author of Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War and the book but much more needs to be said. Another introduction to Melrod and his work and a recent interview that he did with Valley Labor Report is here.

Jon Melrod was one of many campus activists who left academia to take work in factories, mills, and coal mines in the late 1960s and 1970s to assimilate into the blue-collar sections of the working-class and build a socialist movement from that base. Most of the people who took that path were quite dedicated to their politics and to their organizations, and taking the steps that they did and staying with it required a special level of self-discipline and a love for the working-class. Many of them failed, but many more had an overall positive impact on the lives and well-being of others and have much to teach today. A few memoirs from this generation of activists and those who followed immediately in their footsteps are available and are worth reading (see here, here, and here). In Melrod's case, his work around dangerous chemicals and work processes brought on a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer which he has managed to beat.

This book can be read as an interesting memoir and as a needed contribution to labor history. It tells us much about how auto workers lived and worked in the Midwest in 1970s and early 1980s and as the auto industry in the United States bottomed-out for a time and took part of the labor movement with us. It describes in good detail important aspects of union-management conflict in the Kenosha, Wisconsin AMC plant and intra-union conflicts as well. UAW Local 72, the union local representing the Kenosha plant, had a history of militant struggle behind it by the time that Melrod arrived there. Union stewards had real power in the plant of a kind that is hard to recall and explain to young workers today. The local was an example of social justice unionism working relatively well when corporate America and many in the labor movement found this type of unionism suspect or dangerous.

That proud history of the union pushing back against the company and winning many key battles over the years and developing a relatively democratic internal structure and culture was incomplete or unfinished, according to Melrod. Racial and gender-based segregation persisted, racist and sexist supervisors and workers presented special problems, and Local 72 was at times vulnerable to bad internal leadership and to pressure from UAW top leadership. The Local 72 union contract had many outstanding features that gave the union some needed advantages, but pay and benefits lagged behind the contracts covering the Big Three. AMC workers, like all auto workers, were employed in an industry that depended on consumer choices and, but the AMC workers had less job security than workers employed by the Big Three.

Melrod's book can also be read as a guide to organizing, mobilizing and action for young and radical workers, and it's here that the author does his best work. Readers who take up Fighting Times as a kind of training manual should read the book slowly and with some deliberation. Melrod became a successful local union activist and leader by taking strategic and deliberate steps and by working with others and by doing his best to fit in to his work groups while still maintaining his principles. There are real challenges to doing this day by day and every day and coming out ahead and the book goes into some detail when discussing the specific challenges that Melrod and his comrades faced. The author takes readers through many of the basics of workplace agitation and building a caucus within a union, becoming a vocal and radical anti-racist and anti-sexist union steward, resisting the inevitable attacks by conservative coworkers and bosses, movement building at work and in the community, negotiating, and even building international solidarity. Melrod was fired and won reinstatement, he and others who he cooperated with to print a radical bulletin were sued and won, he was threatened and had his car vandalized and survived, he ran for union office and took a couple of losses before he and a slate of radicals and progressives won, and he reached out to Black, Chicano and women workers in his plant and built principled unity with them. The FBI helped blacklist him, and he went through years of being redbaited, but he won many of his coworkers to his side. All of this took place under extraordinarily stressful conditions. 

I want to underscore that I found Fighting Times to be a much better and more useful teaching tool than Jane McAlevey's popular No Shortcuts or Hamilton Nolan's The Hammer. Readers should keep in mind that Melrod remains a committed revolutionary and comes from a place that McAlevey and Nolan have not. Melrod describes describes class conflict and class war but doesn't use the too-popular rhetoric of "class struggle unionism." He takes up how to handle losing fights against the bosses and still maintain radical hopes and perspective. These political differences matter.

The book does have some shortcomings. Melrod doesn't mention it, but he was a part of a tendency known as the New Communist Movement (NCM), at least for a time. NCM activists were often hardcore and especially dedicated people who were just as often a bit ahead of the political curve and trends on the Left. The book doesn't give readers much insight into this side of Melrod's considerable political work or tell us much about how his political and union commitments dovetailed and what happened when they didn't. There are also moments in the book when Melrod loses needed objectivity and could have, or should have, shown more understanding. There are passing moments when he relies on stereotypes to describe people. He writes with a particular symmetry of the relationships between class, race, gender, and labor in mind but he doesn't explain this or provide context for this. None of these shortcomings are of such importance that you shouldn't buy this book and study it carefully. 

I understand that the first PM Press book run has nearly sold out. I hope that the publisher will do a second run and that Jon Melrod can do a book tour.