Flint Could Be Any Town
by Jack Burgess
I lived in Flint, Michigan a long time ago. The water was clean and fluoridated, ahead of its time. Flint in 1960 was a progressive city of 200,000 people with one of the nation’s highest per-capita incomes. Today, Flint is the center of a national emergency, its water poisoning its people, and half of them fled. Thousands of homes stand vacant. How did this happen in America, people ask. How indeed.
Flint is not really unique. History shows many boomtowns, where populations soared as some precious resource was discovered. Timber, oil, gold, anything that could make a lot of money for entrepreneurs, and jobs for willing workers. When the resource played out, some towns dried up and became ghost towns. That unfortunate pattern may be playing out in today’s fracking towns of the West, as oil prices drop. In Flint’s case, it was lumber and location that made it a great manufacturing city, where Buicks and Chevys were made, and General Motors was born.
Flint was also the city where the modern labor union became a reality—almost 100 years ago. In December of 1936, buoyed by New Deal labor law that legalized unions and strikes, United Auto Workers members occupied a GM factory, sat down, and refused to leave. Their wives handed food in through the windows. After a weeks-long standoff, featuring a battle between the police and the strikers, with 14 strikers shot, Governor Murphy–unlike current Governor Snyder–sided with the local people and sent the National Guard to protect them. An agreement was reached on February 11, 1937.
As the UAW grew in strength from this victory and Roosevelt’s policies favoring unions, contracts were negotiated which helped create working America’s strong middle class that prevailed into our lifetimes. Paid sick leave, the 40 hour week, and overtime pay were expensive, but for dirty, dangerous jobs, the wages and benefits were fair. Certainly GM prospered, becoming the world’s largest auto maker.
But, by the 1970’s, management became complacent, designing gas-guzzling, sometimes shoddy cars, as foreign manufacturers were sending us the opposite, and competing very well. Then the oil crises of the ‘70s sent fuel prices skyrocketing. Management decided to abandon some of their unionized factories in Northern states and move to the South, where unions were rare and wages low. Or Mexico and Asia, where wages were even lower. This un-American shift by manufacturers was supposedly justified by a self-serving philosophy glorifying the “maximization of profit.” Anything goes in business, as long as it makes ever more money for top management. Workers and communities be damned. In Washington, Senators Metzenbaum of Ohio and Riegle of Michigan, a Flint man, led a fight to require successful companies to help pay for losses to workers and communities left behind. The effort failed, and corporations were free to abandon communities like unwanted children.
Michael Moore of Flint documented this disaster in Roger and Me. The film won awards, but nothing much was done about community abandonment, declining wages, and the disappearing middle class—which was happening not just in the “rust belt” of Michigan and Ohio, but across the nation. It was made worse by President Reagan’s policies of union busting and scapegoating government—“government is the problem.” This went hand in hand with the bogus idea that cutting taxes would stimulate the economy, a policy followed by Snyder in Michigan, leaving communities without the resources to deal with necessities such as infrastructure and water purification. The NAFTA agreement, put together by the first George Bush, passed by Bill Clinton, gave American cities and workers another kick in the teeth, though rising technology and stable energy prices disguised the problems in the 1990’s.
Which brings us to today’s near-death experience in Flint and the emergence of a Democratic socialist as a leading candidate for President. The outcome of the 2016 election is anybody’s guess, but clearly it’s time to retire the failed dogmas of business-can-do-no-wrong and government nothing right. As FDR proved in the Great Depression, and President Obama re-emphasized with his successful auto bail out in 2009, government can help a lot, and needs to. Flint is a metaphor for America–the canary in the mine to the rest of the U.S.
Jack Burgess is a retired teacher of American & Global Studies in Chillicothe, Ohio. He grew up in Flint, Michigan & Portsmouth, Ohio, studied history, government, English, and law at The Ohio State University. In addition to teaching he worked as Executive Director of the Columbus Education Assn. teachers’ union, Ohio Council Coordinator for the Service Employees International Union, and Chief of Arbitration Services in Ohio’s Office of Collective Bargaining. He’s also a poet with a chapbook of poems entitled It’s Always Gettysburg. He has three sons and a daughter (all grown) and lives with his wife, music teacher and poet, Kathleen Burgess. His columns appear in the Chillicothe Gazette and other Ohio publications. This column is reprinted from the Chillicothe Gazette.