“Stalin Over Wisconsin”

Description

For union organizers, community activists, and labor scholars the republication of Stephen Meyer’s Stalin Over Wisconsin: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 is especially timely.

Meyer tells the story of fiercely militant, and Communist-influenced, UAW Local 248, which represented the huge Allis-Chalmers plant outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded during the heyday of industrial unionism in the 1930s, Local 248’s history demonstrates how, against all odds, a forceful rank-and-file union can be built—and how and why it can be undermined.

Providing specific details that will prove valuable to organizers today, Meyer emphasizes how workers’ grievances served as the catalyst for unionization, and shop floor struggles challenging ‘managerial prerogatives’ provided Local 248 with an ongoing source of its strength.

Local 248 long ago passed from the scene —but its story, thankfully, can now be revisited by those hungering to revitalize the labor movement.