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Naomi R. Williams, "A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
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Marshall Po
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Tom Disena
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Naomi R. Williams, the author of A Blueprint for Worker Class, Politics and Community in Wisconsin. Like many Midwestern factory towns, deindustrialization damaged racine in the 1970s and 80s. But the Wisconsin city differed from others like it in one important way. Workers maintained their homegrown working class economy and political culture even as labor declined across the country. Racine's workers successfully fought for fair housing and education, held politicians accountable, and allied with racial and gender justice organization. My guest today is Naomi R. Williams, Associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University. Their primary research interests include labor and working class history, urban history and politics, gender and women, race and politics, and more broadly, social and economic movements of working people. Naomi Focuses on worker voice and lay capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Naomi's research also examines the way working people impact local and national political economies and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi Williams, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer/Host (brief interjection)
Thank you.
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Naomi R. Williams
And thank you very much for the invitation to participate.
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Tom Disena
So before we get started on the particularities of this book and Racine, Wisconsin, I'd like to ask what brought you to the study of labor movements more broadly?
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Naomi R. Williams
I was interested to understand why the stories I was getting in my history classes during my undergraduate program didn't really match my lived experience growing up in the South. And what I saw in my community was people working together to make things better for each other. And there were multiracial alliances. There were really hardworking folks who had their hands in a lot of different hats, if you will, attempting to improve housing and education and access to jobs. And it just seemed like the stories I was getting about that same time period in my history books talked about divisions and identity politics and the things that divided folks. And it wasn't until I took an oral history methods class on Southern labor history that I was like, oh, here's the story that I was looking for. And so I really became interested in how people saw themselves as workers, if people did see themselves as workers, and what that meant for communities. And so it just moved me into labor history.
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Tom Disena
Yeah, sure. So let's get into the particularities of Racine, Wisconsin. What makes this city unique, but at the same time, sort of emblematic of some of the things that we see happening across the. Appear in your work.
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Naomi R. Williams
Yeah. So, you know, it was an interesting case because it's a small industrial city, but there wasn't just one manufacturer. There wasn't just one company where folks worked. So there was a lot of different types of industries, small parts companies that were feeding the auto industry in the area. But also they had garment making and beer making, and so different crafts. And also they were organized across different sectors, public and private office workers. There were active women in the labor movement in the area. And so it seemed like there was a lot of different things to look at. And because it was a small town, it was kind of easy to go deep and broad at the same time in one project. So that made it an interesting place for me to study. But I really came across the city because of a 1976 strike by hospital workers. And I was really interested to see the UAW workers marching on the picket line with them in 1976. Right. Lots of white guys and Then black and brown women on the picket line together. And I'm like, okay, that seems interesting. But through the research, I came to understand that they had a broad understanding of who belonged in the working class. And they showed up for folks in a lot of different place, in unexpected places. And I think it's because of their attention to history and their political use of their history as a labor town and how they continue to bring that up during each new generation. And it really became a generation. Right. It was family members who were getting these union jobs. Understanding that the union jobs was what was pulling them into the middle class lifestyle. And to repeat that history to each other, I think, made it a really unique place. And something else that made Racine unique is the labor press. So they had a very active labor newspaper that lasted over 40 years, and it was independent, it was supported by a coalition of unions. And so the editors tried to make sure that it was a balanced portrayal of what was happening in the city. And that really kind of fed the energy of keeping the idea of the labor community active over the generations. And so when plants started leaving, and plants started leaving fairly early in the late 1960s, everything they did was about maintaining and growing and moving to different sectors as new companies came in, as new organizing opportunities came in. So when the laws changed and hospital workers were able to be organized, that opened the door to new organizing. As service jobs came in, you know, that. That also shifted. But, you know, as is typical. Right. They started to lose ground over time, and population decline really is what ultimately, I think, kind of made it look similar to, like, the Rust Belt towns that we read about in the literature.
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Tom Disena
So you point out that people from Racine. Are we calling them Racinians? Is that the Racinians?
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Naomi R. Williams
Is that right?
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Tom Disena
Yeah. Okay, we have a debate. I'm in Michigan, so we have a debate about whether we're Michiganians or Michiganders. So I wanted to correct. So you begin the story. You mentioned that they had a. A deep sense of their own history, and a lot of that. I think, again, the idea of a labor newspaper existing for 40 years had to be just a treasure trove for someone doing historical work on this period.
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Naomi R. Williams
Oh, definitely. Definitely, yes. It was actually my entryway into research because a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, Jane Collins, had come across the newspaper article, and there's a front page article with when the UAW workers showed up on the picket line. And they showed up because a police officer hit two of the women strikers. And they're like, oh, no, we gotta protect our community. And then they showed up that afternoon and, you know, the camera was there. And so that. That really kind of pulled me in and gave me access to things that I wouldn't otherwise have found. So I was able to find people's names and addresses and union records through the newspaper.
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Tom Disena
You begin the story of Racine's working class culture in the 1930s, and the focal point for this part of the narrative is a figure by the name of William Blue Jenkins. I was wondering if you could share with our listeners a little bit about what makes William Jenkins such an exceptional part of Racine's story.
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Naomi R. Williams
Yeah, William Jenkins was a fascinating person. I wish I had a chance to interview him for the book. But luckily he had an interview recorded with the Wisconsin Historical Society, and I was able to listen to that recording. And then I learned a lot about him in the newspaper and then in his union and in the Central Labor Council's records. So he really was one of the key figures, as I point out in the book with a few other folks, who really kind of kept that continuity throughout the generations. So the Jenkins family moved to Racine in the early 1900s, somewhere between 1916, 1918. And he was just a young child when they moved there. But his father realized when they got to Racine that he had been hired as a strikebreaker and he was a unionized co worker. And he understood the importance of union solidarity and not breaking a picket line. And so he didn't take the job. But at the same time, even though he showed solidarity to the workers at the company, he could never get a union job in Racine. So he spent the rest of his life working in low wage jobs in different. As an unskilled worker, if you will, at different job sites, building houses and things like that. But he really told his family that it was important that union jobs were the path to economic democracy at work and even to political democracy in the United States. And so that really held for William Jenkins, and he held onto those ideas. And then when he was in high school, he played football on his high school team, and he was the only black player. Parents were unhappy with the fact that a black student was going to be captain of the football team. But the coach stood up for him, and he actually overheard the coach talking to a group of parents about this and standing up for him. And he told an interviewer that it just proved to him the importance of when you have a position of power to look out for other people who didn't have that position. And then he took that Idea into his work life. When he joined the union at. Sorry, at Racine Steel Castings, he took that idea with him. And anytime he had an opportunity to speak up for other workers at work, he did. And then workers started turning to him and started seeing him as a leader in the union. Even though he wasn't an elected union member, he became a very active shop steward, and that just opened the door for workers of all sorts to see him as a leader in the community. And then he became president of the central labor council. And then he used that position to build a coalition within the central labor council of a few different unions who were really focused on racial justice issues. So he worked really closely with the garment workers and the teamster locals in the city, and they kind of built a smaller crew within the larger labor community that were focused on racial and gender justice. And that really just fed this idea of, okay, we have a broad idea, a broad definition of working class politics.
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Tom Disena
It's an astonishing story because it's not necessarily the one that we think of when we think about the intersection of race and gender and working class culture, is it?
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Naomi R. Williams
Right.
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Interviewer/Host (brief interjection)
Right.
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Naomi R. Williams
It isn't. And it helped, too, that he was really active in the Racine chapter of the naacp. His father in law was one of the founding members of the Racine local of the naacp, the national association for the Advancement of Colored People. And then when he became president of the naacp, he actually got unions to join as organizational members. And so they really kind of built through the structure of a few of the UAW locals across the city, an idea that it was important to support racial justice in order to have economic democracy. So it's really astounding. And later on, it became an issue of, within the black community, intraclass, interracial class debate about who's going to lead this organization. And so the working class was like, you know, working class leadership and working class culture is really important to this. And so there's a bit of attention within the NAACP in the local area.
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Tom Disena
Yeah. And again, the way you tell the story is absolutely fascinating, and I, again recommend the book. There's an image, I think, in the popular imagination, of the 1950s as this relatively tranquil, perhaps even oppressively tranquil period in our nation's history. And your chapter on Racine's experience of that decade adds some much needed context to that picture. This is a period of both struggle and expansion in cities like Racine. So what shape did that struggle take there?
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Naomi R. Williams
Yeah, it was actually a pretty intense struggle in the 1950s in Racine right. And in fact, in his interview, Jenkins told the interviewer that the reason why the labor community remains so active is because they always had to fight. And the largest company in town was the J.I. case Company, the Jerome I Case Company that made agricultural equipment. And the workers there, largest union in the city, UAW Local 180, they didn't have standard, what was considered at the time, standard contract bargaining language. They were still fighting for due check off. They were still fighting this idea of the management prerogative to dictate all the working conditions and where people were going to be, all aspects of work life, right? And so the workers were constantly battling Case. And because they had to do this, they stayed constantly on strike. They stayed picketing, they, you know, they stayed in intense negotiations. And when negotiations broke down, as one of the leaders of UAW Local 180 said at the time, it's like, you know, we just had to stop working. That was our negotiation style. We just had to go out on strike, we had to sit down, we had to disrupt production over and over again. And because that continued to happen, it allowed them, it gave them space, again, this political use of their past to always go back to remember what happened in 1918, remember what happened in 1930, remember what happened in 1945. And so they continue to just retell the story. And every time they had a win, they pointed back to see it was what we did to make the city better. And then at the same time, this is when the labor movement gets really active in local politics. And so they support a labor lawyer for mayor and he wins. And so when he becomes mayor, they again celebrate, look at what we've done. We've created this atmosphere. They ran candidates for the city's common council. And they also said, well, you know, because we're dependent on charitable organizations, then we should be on the boards of charitable organizations. And so they were really wrestling control from the business leaders who had maintained all of these power positions in the city, saying that, you know, working people as full citizens, right, we deserve, and in fact, we're required to take these leadership roles and to direct the shape of how the city's going to go, how the county's going to go, how the state's going to go, right? So they really saw themselves as being key movers in the city.
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Tom Disena
And it's interesting that the, you know, again, this working class culture, and you think a really activist working class culture is developing here. And again, this is in the 1950s, right? This is well after, excuse me, the Treaty of Detroit. Right. Where a lot of these matters were supposed to have been settled in industrial policy and got this little pocket of, you know, the case company is really actively resisting a lot of what a number of other manufacturers and, you know, the big three here in Detroit had already come to accept.
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Naomi R. Williams
Right, exactly. And that was the argument that the workers were making. They're like, listen, if they're doing it in Detroit, we should be doing it here. And it really brings this tension to conservative business leaders in the 1950s, really looking to push back the New Deal gains and to gain more control again. And so it never smooths out. And it also is a pathway for some of these conservative leaders to move into leadership in these organizations and then push a different agenda. And so in the 1950s. Right. They attempt to, after the passage of Taft Hartley, conservative business leaders, together with some of their allies at the state level, attempt to bring right to work to Wisconsin. So it's a huge battle. Right. And so we're seeing workers are going to Madison to say, like, we have to put a stop to this immediately. We can't roll back.
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Tom Disena
Yeah. So one of the most interesting ideas I found in your book is the notion of total person unionism.
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- [20:03]
Naomi R. Williams
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- [20:06]
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- [20:13]
Naomi R. Williams
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Naomi R. Williams
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- [20:47]
Tom Disena
What did Racine labor leaders understand by this idea of the total person unionism?
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Naomi R. Williams
Yeah, and so to be clear, that's not my phrasing. That's something that I got from, you know, Robert Bustle and his look at St. Louis and the workers there. But it was. It was a similar sort of idea, and it was a part of the CIOs, the CIO culture at the time, right. And that what a worker was doing at work was only a part of their life experience. Like they needed shelter, right. They needed to feel safe at home. They needed to be active participants in the whole political economy of the local area. They needed to educate their children, they needed to move into these middle class lifestyles and reap the benefits of what was called the American dream. And so in order to do that, you couldn't just pay attention to what was happening at work. You had to pay attention to also what was happening in the community. And you had to pass it on and show up for each other and feel connected. And I think that so much of their experiences too, because a lot of the leaders in the 1950s came of age during the Great Depression, and they felt that desperation as young children. And so they wanted to make sure that that didn't happen again. And in order to do that, they had to keep pressure on political officials to keep working class issues at the forefront of all of the debates. And so it really motivated them to push this way. And then, because, you know, because they didn't have the Treaty of Detroit, right, they had to keep fighting for it every step of the way. It just really kind of shaped a sense of social responsibility within the working class that I even saw when I. I was interviewing a worker in particular who had worked at Hamilton beach until the company left, and he was president of the local. As the company was dismantling equipment, promising them that they weren't going to shut down. They were watching equipment get dismantled, and they're being told, no, everything's fine, everything's fine. He takes a job at SEIU and becomes a business manager there. And he's like, you know, we just felt that we had to find a space where we could continue to organize workers and continue to build our local community. And so this idea really, again, followed generations, because when the folks in the 1950s, when they retired, they didn't just retire and sit back, they got involved in community issues. They joined community organizations and they fought for, you know, utility cost rates and senior citizen benefits and all sorts of other things. So they stayed really active in the community. And then every Labor Day, they had an opportunity to tell their stories and again, the press, right? And they had a radio show, they had the newspaper, they had all of these venues to continue to use their past to shape their present.
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Tom Disena
So there's racing story like the story of so many communities. Like, it is one that struggles with issues of race and class. And this is a theme that runs throughout your entire book, but you shine the brightest light here on it. In chapter four, explain to us how these differences manifested themselves in Racine's efforts to build a working. Build working class solidarity.
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Naomi R. Williams
Yeah. So, you know, it sounds like a beautiful story, and it is. Right? And for me, so many of the people who did this work are heroes, and it really is a blueprint for something that we can do right now, today. But it wasn't perfect. And not everybody was walking in line with what the few leaders were saying, Right. And they made a huge difference in the day to day lives of so many people in the city. And at the same time, someone as locally famous as William Jenkins was, couldn't buy a home in the neighborhood that he wanted to. Right. And so he tells the story of his wife, who is very light skinned, going to look at a house and getting a favorable. Yeah, you know, okay. And then when he showed up and he's a dark skinned black man, suddenly the house is no longer for sale or someone else just bought it, Right. And then one of his, another union leader said, hey, like, let me, let me buy the house. I'll pretend to be you, and then you can move in. And then once you move in, everybody will see. And he said, no. He's like, you know, that's a disrespect to who I am as a person. So he didn't do that. But also he didn't get the house in the neighborhood that he wanted. A lot of the black people who moved to Racine, like, the population really exploded during World War II, and they moved into housing that had. Had been set up to deal with the population growth during mobilization for World War II. And so they were temporary housing. It was supposed to be temporary housing. And here they are, they're still in these trailers on the edges of the city. And they slowly deteriorated. And every time they attempted to move into new areas, they were denied access to those areas. And so there was a long, there was a decades long campaign for fair, for fair housing law in the city that never gets passed. And it's not until the 1960s when they hold a. They march on the city and say, you know, they march to city council and say, you have to do something about this. You have to pass this law of real estate agents and skilled trade workers who were really opposed to building public housing or affordable housing through any of the Great Society programs because they felt that it was going to interfere with their ability to make profits and dictate the course of what the local building would look like. And so that was an ongoing fight. And what the labor newspaper did, they went around and took pictures. So during that whole battle, they just took pictures of the housing. And they're like, how can we let workers live in the dilapidated housing like this? And there was a big case when a black teacher moved to town. And what the teachers union would do was help new teachers find a place to stay. And so they made arrangements for this new teacher to rent a house. But when the owner of the house realized that the teacher was black, he tried to back out of the deal. And so there teachers association gets involved with NAACP and in the larger labor community to really say, like, why is this a thing that we have to continue to fight this over and over again? So things weren't perfect in the 1970s when a sociologist came and was doing a study of the city. They were interviewing black and Mexican American or Puerto Rican residents in the city. And it was really shocking to see the level of discouragement that these families felt in terms of, okay, if we get a good education, it doesn't mean that we have access to the jobs, because the jobs are not held for us. And in the 1960s, with the push to get fair employment, they got congressional hearings in this little small industrial town. And so they're getting the hearings, and I kind of jumped around in time there too. But in the 1960s, they're holding these hearings to see about access to employment and come to find out that the place where William Jenkins worked had the highest number of black workers in the city. And other companies, they had single digit numbers of black workers. And so the population had exploded at that time. But then access to jobs had not, especially the unionized jobs had not exploded in the same way. And in fact, at those hearings, it became very clear that people had just been hired because they had been working at the company for less than a month when the hearings happened. So they were just only hired to say, hey, we got a few in the door before the hearings came. And so it was a constant battle. It was a constant fight to kind of shape it. But I think the most important thing was that they didn't remain quiet about it. And they didn't see it as a race issue alone. They saw it as race and class. Right. Black women were kept out of industrial jobs for a really long time. And it became very obvious when they were dealing with the industrialization and the rise of the service economy and the flood of organizing and nursing homes, and it was mostly black and Latino women. And there was for a lot of Them their first time having a unionized job in the city, despite the fact that there was pretty good union density in the town.
- [30:26]
Tom Disena
So again, the story about housing takes us to the process of suburbanization here. I'd like you to ask you to read from your book, if you would. There's a passage on page 105 that I think summarizes this nicely. Great.
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Naomi R. Williams
Thanks for asking.
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Tom Disena
Absolutely.
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Interviewer/Host (brief interjection)
The movement of families to the suburbs facilitated by new deal post war policies, reshaped the political alignment of urban areas and affected local decision making. As white middle class families moved outside the city, city and county budgets became stretched due to shrinking tax bases. The workers who moved held on to most of the well paying jobs and positions of power in the city, which directed even more funds to providing services for these developing suburbs while leaving older city services and public works projects without the needed funds to make improvements. While the labor movement and liberal agenda that supported unions during the high tide of post war prosperity opened the door for many workers, the ways in which they reshaped society privileged those who held the best union jobs. White male, suburbanized in growth industries. By the 1970s, a growing social divide existed.
- [31:40]
Tom Disena
That paragraph sums up up so much of our history. It just sort of encapsulates a great deal. A few months ago, I had the privilege of speaking to your colleague at Rutgers, Eric Blanc, about suburbanization and sort of, you know, this problem of workers sort of scattering around and no longer having a central place to. Right. To gather and form a sense of community. Tell us a little bit about what that experience was like in Racine.
- [32:16]
Naomi R. Williams
Yeah, you know, it really held a big part of their identity and how they understood themselves. Right. As affecting change in the city. They had a labor temple. And then a lot of the CIO unions got together and built the Racine Labor Center. And so the Racine labor center became like a hub in town. It was strike headquarters when there were strikes. It was a rallying point. And in fact, the NAACP had offices in the Racine labor center. And the immigrant rights group Voices de la Frontera has an office inside the labor center. It was just seen as a place to really shape how things were going to move.
- [33:07]
Tom Disena
Yeah. And that even, you know, it seems so simple, but that idea of a structure where people can have a sort of a central point in the gathering space and all of those other things is so crucial for the kind of solidarity that folks in Racine were building.
- [33:24]
Naomi R. Williams
Yeah. And at that time, they were neighbors to a degree. Right. And so, you know, the neighborhoods were segregated, but also Strategically, they could gather in particular places, but they did more than just show up for union meetings. They had softball teams and they went bowling together at the Racine Labor Center. There was a bowling alley, so they were bowling together. They had rallies and parades. And they just kind of kept this idea that what we do, we do together in such a way. It was even. One of my favorite parts of going through all of those decades of newspaper articles was every summer they would have a whole section on used your vacation that your union won for you. Here they highlight things that were drivable throughout the state of Wisconsin. Go to this lake. And that too, kept them connected to protecting the environment and the importance of having these green spaces and having these activities that they could do together and the need to support the natural world in that way so that they can use their vacations in these pristine sites. Wow.
- [34:51]
Tom Disena
So we're sort of coming to the conclusion here. And of course we have to talk about what I think is probably, again, I've done a number of interviews about people doing labor histories of various kinds. And we always come up to the 1980s. And the way I put it to one author was, well, and then Reagan fired the PATCO strike, and everything kind of goes downhill. How did Racine experience the deindustrialization that ravaged so many working class communities in this period?
- [35:24]
Naomi R. Williams
Yeah, I mean, it took a heavy toll on the city. I said earlier, population loss was huge. They lost 20 to 30,000 residents in the 1980s. It was a really shocking number in terms of population decline, but also just the impact on the neighborhoods. So you had the savings and loans crash, which people lost their homes, and there was a whole campaign, right, to save people's houses and to protect the city from the worst of the savings and loans crash. But it took a big toll. This is where someone else in the book, Tony Vallejo, gets really active in trying to keep utility costs down so that people could afford to maintain their houses, because they understood that, that so much of their middle class lifestyle was built in home ownership. And so they fought really hard to hold onto that. But also, you could see the social impact on people's day to day lives. There was a rising uptick of alcoholism and drug abuse in the city. And so there were efforts within the labor community to deal with that. It became clear. So they were trying to save people's jobs if they're showing up intoxicated at work. So they would try to get in the. Into treatment centers. And then they said, oh, wait, the treatment centers are. They're not culturally sensitive. And so we need to do the training. We need to hire folks where when workers show up that they'll feel connected to it. It took a huge toll on black workers because they were often the first fired because they were the last hired. And so that just led to a lot of tension in terms of trying to seek out services and then feeling like they were dealing with racism every time they tried to get access to these. William Jenkins got really involved in trying to create job training for young workers and find folks other jobs, because what typically happened during the boom and bust cycles is workers would move from one foundry to another, one plant to another. They could depend on public work services. And so they could get jobs with the city for a while or where with the county, and then go back to their industrial jobs. But then that started to dry up as well. And so workers got together, they tried to. They attempted to buy at least one company like as a worker collective, and that fell through. But they were protesting at headquarters trying to fight for jobs. They fought really hard to get severance packages for their workers. And for a long time when plants closed down, because the newspaper was supported by union, by the different unions, they would make sure that workers had access to newspapers. They. They keep the subscriptions going for as long as they could so people could connect. And they would have reunions and parties and they would get together at Christmas and try to support all the families by giving all the different toys out. But all of those things, right. It still wasn't enough. But they didn't get discouraged, right. Even. Even in 1989, when that's pretty much where I end the book, right? A Republican governor is elected and they're not discouraged. They're like, like, yeah, we got this. We've been able to push back. Every time they push, we've been able to push back. So they ended the decade really hopeful. And it was just a few years later, through a few more decertification drives, where they lose the newspaper in the early 90s, and because there's so much population loss and job loss, people don't have access to the union job. They don't have that media that they had to kind of support the community. But also in 2012, right. You still hear them talking about themselves. They're like, we might not have unions, but this is still a union town. And so they still have held onto that idea.
- [39:37]
Tom Disena
That's interesting. So even though we don't have the unions, we're still a union town.
- [39:41]
Naomi R. Williams
Indeed.
- [39:43]
Tom Disena
That's an interesting. That's yeah. So your book is called a blueprint, and you were offering up Racine as an illustration of the possibilities and the pitfalls of building worker solidarity across the lines of race, class, and gender. So as we're moving now, I think it's safe to say, in period of increasing labor activism. What lessons do you hope people will take from your study of Racine?
- [40:09]
Naomi R. Williams
I would like for people to understand, especially when they're organizing new workers, that they can't just focus on what's happening at work. It has to be bigger than that. Right. We are, you know, workers are being attacked from every angle. And we have to recognize that we're whole people and what's happening at home, people's ability to get to work safely. Right. People can't even get to work. They're being kidnapped on the street. So how are we organizing with that in mind? How are we understanding that all of our fights are connected and that if we're going to save democracy, we have to make it practical in people's day to day lives so that people can go to school, people can go to work, people can live and thrive and not just survive. And I think that for me, that's what I found so exciting about every generation of workers that I was able to look at and were seeing is that at least a few of them were constantly saying, hey, all of us are a community. And they were really clear on that. That was their term. We are a labor community. And they acted like a community. And I think that that's the model that we need. Need. We need to understand that we are all connected and that democracy requires all of us, in all parts of us.
- [41:30]
Tom Disena
And it does transcend. Again, we didn't get a chance to talk about this, but it transcended the categories of employment. Right. So when we sort of moving out of those industrial jobs and now it's service workers who are. Who are being organized that shows up in Racine. Right. And there's solidarity across those lines.
- [41:58]
Naomi R. Williams
Exactly. Yes. One thing we didn't talk about was a social worker strike and the fact that the social workers went on strike because the welfare recipients went on strike. And so they're like, oh, we support you. Right. And the teachers go on strike and the industrial workers show up for the teachers and farmers show up for this teachers. Right. And it's like we, we see this, we understand this. And because they had such broad organizing across all those different sectors, that was one of the key factors in their ability to sustain and then adapt as things change. Yeah.
- [42:34]
Tom Disena
And it's interesting because, and again, I don't. That part of the story is, is, was fascinating to me because my, my grandfather was a UAW local president around here and you know, sort of a union man down to his socks, but he didn't have much patience for teachers unions and even with, I will say, his own grandson, you know, so to read about people in Racine, like, sort of like getting over that to me was. It's an astonishing. Know, it doesn't. It's not a part of what we think of as labor history. And, and it's such an important story to tell.
- [43:19]
Naomi R. Williams
Yeah, yeah. No, it, it's, it's very important. And you know, all workers deserve dignity at work and all workers deserve solidarity with each other, for each other.
- [43:29]
Tom Disena
Well, again, I thank you for telling that story. It's a, it's a wonderful one. The whole book is terrific. Before I.
- [43:36]
Naomi R. Williams
Thank you very much.
- [43:37]
Tom Disena
Before I let you go today, can I ask what you're working on next?
- [43:41]
Naomi R. Williams
I am building an archive here in New Jersey, a workers oral history archive. And so I'm working on that now because I'm really interested in understanding some workers who often again, get left out of the stories we tell. And right now we have this huge logistics corridor in New Jersey and I would love to hear those workers stories and to learn about their communities. I think oral history and local history is really important because it adds nuance, wants to our understanding of what it's like to build across communities. And so I like to start collecting those stories so that we can tell more local history.
- [44:23]
Tom Disena
Well, that sounds fantastic. Naomi Williams, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [44:27]
Naomi R. Williams
Thank you.
- [44:29]
Tom Disena
Once again, my guest today has been Naomi R. Williams, the author of A Blueprint for Worker Class, Politics and Community in Wisconsin from the University of Illinois Press, us. My name is Tom Disena and you are listening to the New Books Network.