HESPERIA, Mich. — With the United Auto Workers Union poised to expand its picket lines amid tumultuous negotiations with Detroit’s ‘Big 3’ automakers, we’re learning the union has strong ties to West Michigan...
A Hesperia woman contacted 13 ON YOUR SIDE this week following a chance discovery.
Her grandfather’s involvement had been instrumental to the development of the modern organized labor movement and many of the strategies still utilized today.
“I remember spending time with my grandpa,” Mary Dawkins related. “I loved him to death.”
Recalling all of the good, old family stories about her grandfather…
“But a lot of this information I did not know,” she noted, gesturing to the assortment of dog-eared newspaper clippings, yellowed with age, splayed out on the kitchen table before her. “I just came across that earlier this year.”
It was only after Mary discovered the stack of old documents and clippings that she learned of the outsized role James Roland played--and continues to play--in the history of the labor movement.
An auto worker who was heavily involved in Ohio’s early organized labor movement which had gained strength during those first, heady years of the Great Depression, Roland’s union activity had gotten him fired from the Toledo Chevrolet plant back in the spring of 1934.
“I have a little article about when my grandpa was discharged… because he would resume his one man picketing of the plant,” Mary indicated another clipping. “He was a tough cookie.”
An account detailed also in the University of Michigan thesis, ‘A Rank and File Union Built by the Rank and File’.
Picking up later that year, when Roland would number among a small band of progressives within the union to break a court-order against picketing Toledo parts-supplier Auto-Lite, which pitted the union against local authorities.
Trouble, scholars say, which eventually prompted thousands of workers from surrounding factories to surround the Auto-Lite plant, cutting off production in the face of tear gas bombs and armed strike-breakers. The group succeed in negotiating a better deal.
“He was involved in so many different ways,” Mary explained. “He had been thrown in jail a few times.”
Synonymous with the cause of organized labor, Roland’s name became the stuff of headlines and heated boardroom back-and-forths.
His work, a critical component of the grassroots movement that laid the ground-work for future activities and organizations to advance their own contributions. The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) among them.
“I don't think, if it weren’t for my grandpa, there would be a union,” she suggested. “It wouldn't be the way it is today.”
Rifling through Roland’s old keepsakes and clippings, it’s as if his legacy were speaking to her, even decades after his passing. And if he were here today, his granddaughter has a sense she knows which side of the picket line Roland would be standing on.
“With his story, I feel he’s looking down on me and [saying] just remember the legacy, remember where it originated from,” Mary related. “Keep on doing what they're doing.”
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