Rev Left Radio - Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

In this outstanding episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Jon Melrod to discuss his new book Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War (use code FIGHTING to get 40% off)!  In this episode, we discuss the life and times of Jon, who in many ways is a real working class hero.  We talk about his early embrace of radical political ideology, his radical campus organizing, his 13 years fighting in and organizing within industrial factories in Wisconsin, his rise within the UAW, and his post-factory work as a lawyer representing political refugees and victims of police violence.  This conversation is really inspiring, and we cannot recommend enough that you pick up the book, read it with fellow workers, and share this episode with those you think would benefit! Jon Melrod is a journalist, activist, and lawyer that 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 this part of his career, he opened a law firm in San Francisco, successfully representing hundreds of political refugees.  You can follow Jon on twitter @JonathanMelrod, and keep up with his latest work and read more about his story on his website jonathanmelrod.com. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons

of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki. Unfortunately, only joined by one of my usual co-host. Today we have Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast with us. Hello, Brett. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Very excited for this conversation. As am I, and it's a timely conversation as well, which we might hit on a little bit towards the end of it. Unfortunately, listeners were not joined by Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, as he had something come up rather last minute and had to drop out of this conversation earlier today. So it's unfortunate for us. It's unfortunate for you, but we are looking forward to having Adnan back for our next conversation very soon. Now, before I introduce our guests in the book that we'll be talking about today, I just want to remind you listeners that you can help support the show and keep us up and running by going to patreon.com, or with slash, Gorilla History. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. On there, you get bonus content, including an ongoing miniseries that Adnan and I are putting together on the religious cultures of the medieval

Mediterranean. I think we've just put out episode five of that. We've got a couple more scheduled to go up soon. So if you go on there to help support the show, you get bonus stuff like that as well. You can also keep up with all of the things that Brett Adnan and I are putting out individually as well as the show collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-Skore Pod. Now, as I mentioned, we have an excellent guest and a really great book to talk about today, and one that actually will be rather timely given recent events in the United States, which is the UAW Strike, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

But today we're going to be talking with Jonathan Melrod, who is the author of the relatively new book, Fighting Times, Organizing on the Frontlines of the Class War, out from PM Press. And we wanted to let everybody know that PM Press is currently running a 40% off special on this book specifically. So if you listen to this conversation, you want to pick up the book, you can go to PM Press's website, look for the Fighting Times, and use the code fighting in all capitals, and you'll get 40% off that book. So hello, John. It's nice to have you on the program. Great to be on here with you guys. Absolutely. So I have to mention, I read this book during the summer, and it was a really fun read.

It was an inspiring read. It's almost an autobiography, but it's a political autobiography of a particular period in your life of being a militant labor activist. And I think that this is something that we haven't talked nearly enough about labor activism on our show, and hopefully that this will be the beginning of a few more conversations in a similar vein. But I'm hoping you can take us off by talking a little bit. The crux of this book is that you were a college-educated radical who ended up working in the factories and in the labor unions in Wisconsin, next to my native Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I will add. So, of course, the questions that you're going to often hear when people are talking to about this book is, you know, why did you go to college? And then why did you decide to go into the labor force and in factories?

You know, why did you decide to work at the American Mueller Corporation after having gotten a college degree from a pretty major and prestigious university at UW Madison? But instead of opening with that question, I'm wondering if you can take us a little bit about along the line of your political development from your childhood. So you mentioned that even in your early days, you know, growing up at this prep school and in Vermont, you know, you were something a little bit of a political outsider even there. I think taking us through that will maybe help explain this decision of yours to then, after finishing your degree, to go into the labor force in the factories. So can you tell us a little bit about, like, how did you come to political consciousness and what were your politics like at that moment of time? How did they kind of develop leading up to this decision of yours?

Yeah, I mean, I think we have to go back a little bit, if I can take a moment in history, because I grew up in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, which was very much like growing up in the Jim Crow South. I mean, not in the white neighborhood, the northwest sector, but in the rest of the city, it was really still very akin to the Jim Crow South. I mean, I'll remember, I never forget, and neither would put, created a lasting impression on me that developed, that contributed to development on my politics for quite a while. We were driving in Virginia, you know, on one of those kind of go out to the country, drive around in the old Chevrolet with your family. And on the side of the road, there was this chain gang of all black prisoners with, you know,

the black and white stripes, chains at the wrist, chains at the ankles, chains around the waist, and then big white guards on horses with shotguns. And it was like, you know, this leads in a with you. In 1960, we used to go to an amusement park called Glen Echo and Maryland outside D.C. And the students from Howard University decided to picket, to integrate it. And as they were picketing, it caused it a huge reaction from white racists who lived in that area, rural area of Maryland, who both brutalized people on the picket line. And at one point, they poured bleach into the pool. So nobody could use the pool, white or black. But, you know, my, you know, I can remember thinking, you know, we're all kids. And it's 90 degrees, 100 degrees in DC. And now

the pool is can't be used. So that kind of stuck with me. So that in 1964, when the, uh, in Mississippi, shorter Cheney and Goodwin, three civil rights workers who were registering blacks to vote, were murdered by the police, well, actually, were arrested by the police, then turned over the clan who murdered them in a bog in Mississippi, you know, it struck in a court, you know, and I said, those guys are not much different in age than I am. And that motivated me to first get involved in student nonviolent coordinating committee, which was one of the civil rights organization at the time, consisting more of young people, a bit more militant, not quite as into the non-violent aspect of it.

And, you know, I worked there putting out stuffing envelopes with thousands of letters of Schwaner Cheney and Goodwin's picture, explaining the murder and calling on people to support the struggle for voting rights in the South. And that's when I was in high school. So in the summer, I had worked at SNCC. And, of course, again, Jim Crow, when I took the bus in my neighborhood, Northwest D.C., it was air-conditioned.

you get out of the D.C. area, and there's no more air conditioning in the buses. And, you know, it's a hundred degrees out. And, you know, it's a completely different world stepping out of the white, you know, the white sector. So in high school, I carried on with my politics, both in supporting the civil rights movement, as well as largely focused on the Vietnam War, because that was what was on all of our minds, in part because we were of the age where going to Vietnam was becoming a very real possibility in the future, but also because I had already developed pretty strong political beliefs by then. In fact, there's an anecdote or a story in the book where I was, I think, about 15, and I was trying to learn more about the world and politics, and I wrote a letter to

Chairman Mao Zedong in China. And I said, you know, dear Chairman Mao, I'm a student in the United States. I don't really think capitalism is working very well. And, you know, is there any information you could send me on socialism in China, which at that point, China was a socialist country? And about three months later, in a brown rapper like pornography or whatever, arrives at my cubbyhole at the school, and it's the four selective volumes of Mao's writings. So that was sort of my kickoff into political theory. Do you still have those volumes, by the way? I know you had a picture that, like, looked like it over to the bookshelf and show up to you right now. I figured. I had seen a picture of some rather, some books that

looked rather worse for wear, let's say. It looks like they got some use in any case. Well, they did win me a long time. Anyway, I love that. Sorry for the interruption, John. No, no, no, no, no. So, you know, one thing to clarify is I wasn't really at a prep school. It was a hippie school on a farm in Vermont. So it was very kind of politically, you know, progressive, left.

A lot of the parents were activists. My roommate was named John Reed Seiden. his parents had named me after the author John Reed, who wrote about the revolution in Russia. And so there was a lot of political, you know, undertone to the whole education. And in 67, I drove a van with other students to Manchester, New Hampshire, where we tried to block the bus driving inductees to register for the Vietnam War. And it was an action all over the country that where we tried to, shut down induction centers. And in Oakland, they actually were able to close the induction center.

In Manchester, we lay down in front of the buses, but when they didn't stop, we all jumped up and ran and sort of said, the hell without nonviolence. It doesn't work. You know, their conscience isn't going to get them to stop the butt. They're going to roll right on over us. So when it came time to look at going to college, I really looked for the college that I thought would be most amenable to my politics. And we had a couple kids the year before me who went to University of Wisconsin-Madison, where there had been one of the first student violent demonstrations against Dow Chemical. They were recruiting on campus and students wanted Dow Chemical thrown off campus for making napal, which was, you know, burning, killing children in Knob. And the police

turned it into a riot and arrested students shot tear gas. It was the first time any confrontation had taken a place like that. So I decided, hey, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to go. And the only other school I applied to was Columbia. And they already had the weatherman, the SDS for me. And they didn't need any more people like me. So I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Yeah, that's wonderful. thing I want to start off by by saying with my question is I just want to like stress to the people listening that you know I really do see you as like a veteran of American class war as a wise elder that all of us today on the socialist left millennials and Gen Z can and should absolutely learn from

and so I just really want to tip my hat to you and you know just stress how much of an inspiration you are to all of us today still fighting the fight and we want to learn from you in this book is a great way to do just that. And hopefully in our best days, we can carry on the torch that you helped light and keep a flame in those days. But let's go ahead and move into your college days, because that's kind of where you left off the story. I know you were a member of the student nonviolent coordinating committee, even though you had some ideological issues with nonviolence, and I'm sure that was a debate within that organization and around it. You also had interactions with the Black Panther Party. So I just kind of want to leave an open-ended question, and you kind of

just walk us through your university days, your relationship with movements like the Black Panther Party and how your politics continue to evolve in those times? Yeah. Initially, I was in SDS students for Democratic Society. And at that time, there were probably 100,000 students on college campuses in high schools. It was really an enormous organization, but also a way of life. You know, you took classes of other SDS members because you wanted to be in the same kind of political discussions in classrooms. You lived with them. You parted with them. So it became very much part of our life, devoting our life to political organizing. And I really appreciate you saying the comments you made, Brett, about, you know, looking at me as an elder.

You know, it's been a little disappointing, you know, to get older and to see so much happening now, such a rebirth of the socialist movement and of the labor movement. and I'm sort of running to keep up with it for as long as I can. So thank you very much for that. But to go back to Madison, in SDS, we had a very unique SDS chapter in Madison, in that it was very non-sectarian, and it was really led by people who understood organizing, that you couldn't just wait and react to events like in Vietnam, but that you had to develop programmatic ways to fight the war while on a college campus.

So in the second year of SDS, when I was there, which would have been the very early fall of 69, we had a monster meeting and there were about 800 new students who attended. That gives you a sense of how large the movement was, that the initiation meeting could be so large. and we had three concrete demands that we wanted to win the new students to, and they were all directly, materially impacting the Vietnam War. We wanted to get mandatory ROTC off of campus because that was developing the officer corps for Vietnam. We wanted to get rid of the land tenure center, which was doing research on counterinsurgency in the third world country, and in fact contributed to the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia

and we wanted to get rid of the Army Math Research Center, which was doing some of the most deplorable research for the military that basically was doing studies on if bombs were dropped, how many ants would they kill? And it was basically a way of talking about how many people could we kill with those munitions. So, you know, the purpose was

to win students to really enlist in organizing around those issues. And we divided up people so that some of us were called dorm organizers. And that meant two or three nights a week. We went into the dorms to talk about the Vietnam War. And we would go room to room, knock on the door, can we come in? And we discussed the whole history. Look, we're not there, you know, for some altruistic reason of some ideological fight against communism,

we're basically there because U.S. imperialism has the need to constantly dominate countries all around the world to maintain monopoly capitalism. And it was really tremendous experience because students became very learned in what the struggle against the Vietnam War was about. So when it came time for demonstrations, not only did we have large participation, because we had been working constantly organizing, but we also had people, many of the students, consider themselves anti-imperialists. You know, very many of them looked at themselves as not just fighting the war, but fighting the system that propagated the war, which was U.S. imperialism. And the same thing applies.

to another struggle I wanted to touch on in Madison, which was in February of 1969, I believe, there was a strike by black students. And the black students have been organizing for quite a few years, meeting with the university, trying to do it, you know, the right way, you know, of sitting down with youths of university committees. Can you create black ethnic studies? can you enroll more black students? Because this is unbelievable. There are only 500 black students

out of some 30,000 students then, and there's about 550 today. So it shows you how little progress has actually been made. So the black students at first tried to strike on their own without the white students. And they couldn't close the university, obviously. They didn't weren't enough students. And we then persuaded them, look, This is all of our fight. It's not just your fight. We want to take up the fight side by side with you. So we organized with them a strike of the university. And it started off very successful because we formed what we called impendetrable picket lines. So we would have rows of like five students in front of each classroom building with arms locked, blocking students from coming in.

Well, most students supported this strike, and those that didn't, couldn't go to class, because, you know, we explained to them the importance of them recognizing this issue, this historical injustice that had been, you know, put on black people since the days of slavery. It's no coincidence that there were only 500 black students. there's a legacy that has remained that has put them in a position where they're not at the stage that they can apply to the university or get into the university or for the university or feel comfortable culturally at the university. So the governor brought in 800 National Guardsmen who came in armed with their weapons and with tanks with 50 caliber machine guns and they would march up to our impenetral picket lines with their bayonet on their rifles

and literally clear us out of the way. So they were really there to break the strike. Same role they had played for many, many years with worker strikes in the United States. We called a march on the Capitol for that night. And when we started marching, I looked back and I couldn't see the end of the march. There were 10,000 students marching in support of the black students' strife, and 98% of those

students were white, which really puts shoots a big hole in this whole nonsense about critical race theory. People can't understand. If you're white, you might be offended by understanding the true history of America. No, these 10,000 students understood the true history and wanted to rectify the true history by making their personal contribution to turning around the world that we lived in. In the end, we weren't able to win, you know, the games we had set out to win. We won an African-American center for the students, and slowly over time there began to be the integration of, you know, ethnic studies. But it was a defining moment on the campus to be able to motivate and mobilize that many students. Through that struggle, there were differences in

the leadership of the black students. Some were very much limited to being cultural nationalists. This is all about black nationalism. But there were others who were connected to the Black Panther Party in Milwaukee. And they saw the struggle as a unified struggle of whites and blacks and Latinos in fighting together to challenge the policies of the university. And one of them, Kenny became my best friend, and Kenny introduced me to the Panther Party. So I took on the job of being responsible for organizing sales of the Black Panther newspaper in Madison every week when the papers were delivered. And at the height, we got up to selling 350 papers to the students on campus.

which was really, I mean, the Black Panther paper was unmitigated militants. You know, there was no holds barred. They were just straight out there. We want a revolution. You know, we don't want the pigs shooting our people in the neighborhoods. And that's what in the end, or in the beginning, landed me on the FBI list. When I finally got my FBI file, I was kind of interested to see that as far back as 1969, They had traced a call from my apartment in Madison in the student neighborhood, Mifflin Street,

to the Black Panther Party office in Chicago to coordinate the sales of the newspaper. So that's when I first hit the radar. And from there, I guess you could say either was uphill or downhill. I mean, in the end, there were a thousand pages that I got from the FBI of their surveillance on me. And basically, they were doing the co-intel pro, which most people have heard of, their counterinsurgency against activists like myself who went to work in factories. I mean, we'll get to it, but they're the ones that got me fired at American Motors initially. So if people are interested, I posted a lot of those pages from the FBI file on my website, because it's very interesting to check it out, to really check. check out the history of that period how they saw it and how much of a threat they saw the

movement to be. And that's just jonathan bellrod.com. We'll also link to this in the show notes, listener. So you can also just go into the show notes, click on the link and you'll be able to find that. So, you know, I could go on and on about Madison. And mostly there's a lot in the book. There's also a very detailed summary on the website that couldn't fit into the book. There's probably 90 pages on every one of the actual struggles, you know, be at the teaching assistant strike, you know, being at the insurgency where we shut the university down after Nixon invaded Cambodia and four college students were shot at Kent State. So you can go refer to all that on the website. But the last thing I'll say is that there was unfortunately a split in SDS. You know, sectarianism. has been an unfortunate endemic problem to the left in the U.S. And out of it, we formed, we followed the political ideology of RIM II, Revolutionary Youth Movement 2, even though we formed our own organization that adhered to those

principles, the Mother Jones Revolutionary League, named after Mother Jones, the famous strike leader of the coal miners. and we wanted to denote that we were about revolution. We weren't about reform. We had two basic principles. Those were that when we graduated, we would either join the army, join the military to organize against the Vietnam War

or to go to work in factories and in working-class neighborhoods to spread the message of change and transformation of the capitalist system that we believe was at the heart of our movement. And we realized you could get so far with students, and that's great. But to really change society, you've got to go to where the society is run, which is out of the industry in the United States. So there were probably the estimates are that probably 10,000 students,

all over the country left campuses to take factory jobs. And these are students that cross the political spectrum. But it was that type of movement that made many of us feel like, hey, we may have graduated college, we might have been able to take some easier, more cushy job, but we were determined to go to work in factories, no matter how difficult the work, or how difficult it was to make that transition because that was our calling, so to speak. That's what we were, we knew we had to do to bring them out fundamental change. Yeah, we're definitely going to get to that. I just wanted to make a quick comment that for a socialist organizer, a thousand page dossier from the FBI on you is like getting handed a trophy. It's proof that you're doing real

good work. So that's pretty funny. Well, I appreciate that. And of course, John is mentioning some of not events, but actions that took place during his college days. One thing that he failed to mention here, but maybe we'll encourage the listeners to read in the book is that, you know, there was even an event that you were the bodyguard, a shotgun wielding bodyguard for, you know, the Black Panthers at an event on campus. But we'll save that for maybe a different conversation. Listeners, you can also read about that in the book. What I do want to turn towards, though, is something that I didn't see really mentioned

in the book. And I'm particularly curious about at this juncture. So we're talking about your burgeoning political ideology and, you know, kind of the formulations that you're going through along with many other radical college students that are deciding, hey, we have to leave and go into industry in order to affect real change. One of the things that I'm particularly interested in are what are the sorts of things that you were reading at this time? Because, of course, it's one thing to have these sorts of conversations with other people

that you were surrounded around, you know, the Black Panthers in your context with them, the students that you, the other student activists that you're surrounded by at UW Madison. But of course, we have to also consider that a lot of these things are going to be acts that have been formulated in the past by previous theorists, you know, political theorists, ideological leaders. And in the book, you know, really in terms of talking about books that you, you know, you was, the main one that, you know, came to mind was the collected works of Mao that you had mentioned in your previous answer. But, you know, during those college days and during this generation of your political ideology, what were some of the things that you were reading that kind of, you know, helped you realize what your true political ideology was and what were some of those things that were kind of also encouraging you more specifically on this decision to then go into, industry rather than, you know, look for some other avenue to exercise your, your political objectives. Well, you're right. That's a really key question, you know. And the really really answer is that there was a revolutionary spirit that swept youth all over the country. Some more

culturally, like the Woodstock people, were the yippies who were, you know, political hippies. But you know, Marxism was really the dominant political ideology on the campus. Just to give you one example, Roman history was an obligatory class that you had to take. And my TA, who taught my section in Roman history, you went to his section if you'd rather study Marxism in Roman history. So, every week we'd meet and we'd discuss the classics Marxism. And, you know, and you actually were being graded as if you were in the Roman history, but you were learning Marxism. And but we did our own self-study.

I mean, we really went through, you know, the classics of Marxism, reading Marx and angles, reading Lenin and then a lot of them were, you know, at that time contemporary writings of revolutionary heroes like you know, Che Guevara, like, you know,

France Fanon, who talked about the liberation of third world peoples. You know, there was just a very, just a wanting to learn, an open-mindedness of letting in anything that we felt

would help us learn better how to build a society that we all felt comfortable in, that was fair to people, and that treated people fairly. So, you know, I'd say that, you know, really the roots are Marxism. Beautiful. Yeah. I wanted to shift into your, you know, your transition out of student organizing proper and into factory work. I know this starts with you getting a job at Easy Painter. And, of course, throughout this process, you were exposed at many different jobs to harmful chemicals. And one of the through lines in this book is that one of the sacrifices, you know, you paid personally and your family paid by proxy of your union activism and your struggle within these factories was exposed to these toxic chemicals and ultimately a cancer diagnosis. So can you kind of talk about this shift into this factory work, easy painter, the chemicals you were exposed to, the very,

after Easy Painter, the various other jobs, you worked, et cetera, and kind of tie it all in with the later cancer diagnosis? Yeah, absolutely. When I first went to work at Easy Painter, of course, I was my first factory job. And, you know, you really want to be accepted. You don't want to, you know, people to look at you like, what is this oddball doing here, you know, trying to organize us. You know, you got to sort of fit in with people, and my straw boss said to me one day, one, I got a very mallow job for you today, sort of in, you know, spanglish, you got to clean the degreaser. Well, the degreaser was this big, probably 10 foot by 10 foot concrete vat. And at Easy Painter, we made paint trays for sears. And when a tray is stamped out by a punch press, there's a coat of oil on it so it doesn't

stick to the dye that's pressing out the shape of the paint tray. And those have to then run on a chain link line through the degrecer. The degreaser is a chemical that just drips, you know, takes the grease off of the tray, and it pools at the bottom of the degreaser. Well, periodically, that degreaser had to be cleaned out. So I looked at, you know, the straw boss and I said, all right, you know, where's my PPE? I mean, where's my breathing protection?

Where's, don't I have anything to put on? He says, Juan, are you a sissy? That's all for sissies, you know? And I'm like, wow, you know, this is really, you know, I mean, he's throwing down, you know, And, of course, this were the days before we understood language being so, you know, politically charged. But in any event, I said, you know, I got to do what I got to do. And I climbed the ladder and jump down into the vat, Vata, as he called it.

And within 30 seconds, I was gagging, my head was spinning, my skin was burning, and I was just breathing pure tricholethylene fumes. and I jumped out to get some fresh air and I looked over at the barrel of trichlorethylene and it had this like two foot red skull and crossbones saying danger and I'm wow this is what I got to do and I kept doing it and I later learned of a friend from one of my partners at American Motors

a later job he had a friend who died around trichlorethylene, it's like alcohol poisoning. It was toxic enough that it just, it killed him. And when I left Easy Painter to go to American Motors, again, later on American Motors, I was exposed to trichlorethylene. They had us just dip our hands in barrels of it. And they could have provided gloves, but they didn't. And, you know, we were somewhat ignorant as to what they affected the case.

chemicals were. One of the, and last thing I'll say that sort of contributes to the issue of cancer was I also went to work in a steel fabrication plant where there was silica dust and asbestos floating all through the air. So, I mean, you know, those are what working people have to put up with. They can't say, oh, I'll take a pass or I'll, you know, I'm not, you know, I don't really want to go to class today. That's what your life is and you got to deal with it.

So in 2004, I was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and told that I only had six months to a year at most to live. And I, you know, I was somewhat shocked and thrown. And I said to the surgeon, I said, that's just, you know, I can't leave. I've got kids that are seven and ten years old, and I got to be here to raise them. And he said, look, I'm sorry, Mr. Melrod. I have to tell you as your surgeon to put your affairs in order and to do it quickly because your diagnosis is such that this is terminal. And virtually nobody survived pancreatic cancer. The best statistic I could find was on people who made it. Some 5% made it for six years, but there were no percentages on people who survived. So I set out to

take that on like I would any battle, and I utilized every means available to fight the disease. I did chemotherapy and radiation, Western medicine. I also went to a Chinese clinic that specializes in treating and boosting the immune system for fighting cancer. I went and used alternative treatments. I changed my diet. I moved to the country because of the level of stress being in San Francisco, just driving in San Francisco is enough to give you cancer. But amazingly, you know, I kept staying alive. And I also decided that I better write my memoirs because my kids kept saying, Dad, like, you asked me, they said, Dad, why did you go to college and then go to work in a factory that's killing you now? You know? And I said, if I don't write

something explaining to them, because they were too young to really understand to explain to them why I was willing to do what I did with my life, why I was willing to make the sacrifices I made that they wouldn't understand me when I was gone and that my future generations that I'll hopefully have, although it's coming kind of slow from my kids, but my future generations will know what I did. So I was able to beat it. And, you know, ironically, I beat it right when the police shot a kid up here, 14-year-old Latino boy who was carrying a toy gun. They murdered him. And I re-upped my bar membership. I had become a lawyer by then. And I took on five cases representing young people who had been

murdered by the police, young brown and black people who had been murdered by the police. And that was one of the later phases of my life was taking on those murder cases for the families that were suing in civil court for damages. So that's kind of the story of me going into the factory initially at an easy painter. But I knew that I needed to be at a more organized plan that had more of an impact on the political and the economic livelihood of Milwaukee. And that was American Motors, which at that time was the fourth largest auto company in the country. Most of your listeners are probably too young to know the cars we made like the pacer and the Gremlin. But, you know, I was hired in with hundreds of other young people

onto the assembly line. And it was a transition because going from being a student to humping the line eight hours a day, one car a minute, was really some tedious, tedious, boring work. I mean, it was really, I mean, nobody that's ever done it can really conceptualize what it's like, particularly for these auto workers today who are striking, who are working 10-hour days, seven days, six to days, seven days a week. It's just devastating and exhausting. It almost leaves you time for nothing else but recovery till the next day of work. I got in the union

after 60 days and it just so happened that about the 63rd day or whatever I wasn't given a morning break and all the workers around me started yelling, hey Melrod don't you got a set of balls aren't you willing to take your break?

It's your right to take the break by contract. Are you a company man? you know, do something. And I'm like, damn, if I'm going to be known as a militant, and I'm just sitting here, you know, not taking my break, it's not looking very good. So finally I said, the hell with it. I threw the taillights into the car, walked off,

sat down in the canteen, lit up a camel, like, you know, those were the old days, non-filter camel. And I waited. And the foreman came charging down the aisle, red-faced wearing his white, short-sleeved supervisor t-shirt, and he's yelling, Melrod, you're fired. Get the hell out of this factory. And all of a sudden, right behind him comes up a guy wearing a blue button that were called Blue Button stewards. And stewards represented only 35 people.

That's how strong that our local union was. each steward represented 35 people and only had to be on the job a half hour a day. The rest of the day was devoted to representation. So he came up and he said, Melrod, you're not fired, go back on your job. And the former says, you're not the boss. And he says, I'm telling you, you violated the contract. You didn't give him a break. You put him back to work.

Right that in there, I decided, I want to be a blue button steward. Because that's the kind of power I want to have, and I want people to see me in that light, that I'm able to stand up to this company. So not too long after that. We also had 100% voluntary overtime. Very unusual. We also, I'll tell you, the three tripartate of rights were the steward ratio of 1 to 35, the right to all voluntary overtime, excuse me, and the right to strike over all grievances.

which were really a tremendous tripartate of powers that had been existing in all of the big three until the Ruther, Walter Ruther took over the union and traded all of those away for better wages, longer vacation, cost of living, which really cut the guts in the heart out of the union. And it was the same time that he purged the left from the UAW, so there was not much opposition. but we had maintained those rights in our local. So when they foreman came around and told us that we'd have to work on Saturday overtime, you know, I was like, what the hell?

You know, we'd party Friday night. How are we going to work on Saturday overtime? I mean, we're young, you know? So I went and took my contract and I found that all overtime was voluntary. So I ran to a Xerox machine, which is like for people's edification, that's like kinkos. And I ran off copies of that page of the contract, Xeroxed them.

And the next morning I handed them out to all the young guys I had been getting to be friends with. A lot of whom were Vietnam vets, particularly black and brown vets, who had come back from non and were not about to be treated like second-class citizens in a factory. And they made that very clear. there were also a lot of young white guys, young white women who were part of the Woodstock generation, just sort of rebellious by nature, wearing bell bottom pants and long hair and platform shoes to work. And then there were quite a few young church women who understood the need for community, unity, and organization. So we all started passing out these flyers

in the shop saying overtime is voluntary. The next day, which would have been a Friday, when the supervisor has to come along with a steward to notify you to work, everybody refused. The word, just you could hear it up and down the line. We ain't working on Saturday. Hire more people. You know, if you want this done, bring in people off of the street, which is a fundamental union principle that was very strong in those days, which is you don't do work that's somebody

unemployed could do. It's the union's obligation to get unemployed brothers and sisters back to work. So they couldn't run the assembly line that Saturday. And when I got in Monday, the word passed that the president of the local union, who was a company man and an international union man, had put the word out that Melrod's going to get it, because I had promised the company a workforce on Saturday. So the next thing that happened in pretty short order was that they notified us that the assembly line was going to be sped up three cars an hour with no work taken off of any job. And this time, I said, we need to get organized. We have to form a caucus in the union so that we do these things as a group and that we hand out our flyers as a group. So we sat down

and we wrote our first flyer, which, by the way, was written on a black stencil that you used this stylus to write on, and then you had to crank the mimeograph machine by hand to turn out a couple thousand flyers. And that was how the caucus formed. It was basically turning out those first flyers.

We went and handed them out the next day in front of the plant gates, and it was like a firestorm hit. You know, the older workers just came alive, and they taught us, how do you fight speed up? You fight speed up by doing the entire job that you've been assigned, regardless of where it takes you down the line. Basically, it's called right to work, work to contract. Contract said we had to work at a normal pace. That's what we put in the flyer. Work at a normal pace.

So you found yourself pushing the next worker down the line because he couldn't put in the trunk rubber because you were still putting in your tail lights. And there were no cars coming off the assembly line that were built 100%. And the aisles were lined up with cars that needed repair. The roof was lined up with cars that needed repair. And then they had sent home the lines in Kenosha where there was another AMC plant because they weren't getting bodies from us in Milwaukee. So to say the least, the company was in an uproar. And we decided to respond to that by upping the ante. So we decided we would learn

how to make t-shirts that we made that said, had a big red stop sign, and it said, fight speed up. And we didn't, we were a little bit intimidated. We brought them in. But right away, the first 25 sold. And we said, we're on to something. So that night we went and we

silk screen hundreds more. And the next day, they all sold. So now you're seeing everybody on the assembly lines putting these t-shirts. on at work, and the company comes around and says, anybody wearing a t-shirt like that tomorrow will be discharged, like we did to black workers who wore black power t-shirts a couple years earlier. So I wasn't really sure what to do. I mean, I only had been there, you know, seven or eight months at this point. I didn't want to cause senior workers to lose their jobs, but all of a

sudden a steward comes up and buys a t-shirt. And then the chief steward comes up and buys a t-shirt. Vice President of the Union comes up and buys a t-shirt and all of them announced to the assembly line that they're wearing them in the next day. So I learned a really important lesson because I kind of came from the generation of where we didn't trust anybody over 30. So these guys were all over 30. So I was like, what are they doing wearing a t-shirts? But I also learned that in a union, you can be a militant caucus, but you can form allies that won't necessarily join your caucus, but they will unite with you over particular issues. So that's a really key principle for today's young people, that you've got to find the people who can form a united

front with you in the union over particular issues, like democracy, like militancy, etc. So needless to say, the next day everybody wore them in and the lines got more clogged with repairs and the company came around and announced that they were taking work of everyone's job. They were hiring an extra person for every section in the factory, which was hundreds of more new workers. And basically, we had won that struggle. And it was really quite incredible to have been to that successful and to have been able to create that kind of mass struggle

so early on in my life in the factory. Of course, the word came out that they were going to fire me, that the president of the union had collaborated with the international to get rid of me. And two days later, some security guards, three of them came up, and they literally lifted me up under my arms, and I was dug by feeding because I said, I'm not leaving, and people on the assembly line were yelling to sit down to save my job, and the stewards had been informed by the president that there should be no job action when I was hauled out of the plan. And when I got out on the street, I looked back up. It was a five-story plan. And I said,

motherfucker, take this to mind. Someday I will walk back up these five flights of steps and I will do the exact same thing I did during this last fight against speed up. And it would be too long to go into all the details. There was a strike vote over winning my job back. which was rigged by the local and the international, although we did win it, but I won at the National Labor Relations Board that blasted American Motors, calling them McCarthy-like,

for having fired me under a pretense of, you know, being a, having branded me a communist, a member of the Black Panther Party, a member of SDS. I mean, this was all what they had circulated on the assembly line to try and intimidate and skirm. people. And when I got my FBI file, if you look at the website, you'll see it, there's a memo where American Motors went to AM, American Motors went to the FBI, like it was their own

Pinkerton private force, and said, what do we do about this guy, Melrod? And the memo that came back said, fire the fucking guy, get rid of him, don't ever let him back to work. You know, he's organizing caucuses, he's causing work stoppages, and get rid of his up. So they did. But 2005 days later, I was finally ordered rehired by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and I returned to work, and it was a great moment because, you know, it was always in me to mess with the company. So I blew up a copy of my back paycheck, you know, like, a boxer does when he walks around on the ring with his belt.

And I walked the assembly line tearing this blown up picture of my back paycheck. And people were cheering and hooting. And it was like, you know, even if people were kind of uptight because I thought I was too radical, everybody.

Everybody loves a David Beach Goliath story. And this was really, I had been up against one of the top 500, you know, Fortune 500 companies. with their entire legal team, you know, coming after me and they got beat, which is really a lesson to be learned for people today that you don't give up. Everything can be a struggle that you have a chance at winning. And if there's anything I can say to people, that's a lesson

to be learned. And persistence is also a critical component of this story because as John mentions, This is his first victory at the NLRB, but by the time he leaves AMC, I mean, I could have introduced you as John 7 and O at the NLR at the NLR at the beginning because you had beaten AMC at the NLRB seven times. And what this shows, again, is persistence. You know, be persistent. Don't allow them to just beat you down. You know, continue, go through, keep up the fight. And of course, if you have other people who have your back and you're organized with them, it makes that fight all that much more successful, which I'm sure, you know, we'll talk about a little bit more, but I just want to underscore that point that when John says he won at the NLRB, you know, thinking about having to take a case to the NLRB as a, you know, a factory worker, it seems like a pretty daunting proposition, especially when you're taking a huge corporation there. But you did it time and time again and continue to win time and time again. I mean, very inspired. as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, it was a very inspiring book in many ways.

And this is just one example of it. So I wanted to throw that out there. But Brett, I think you had a comment that you wanted to make as well. I respond to your comment. Go ahead, of course. It's really an important lesson because a lot of young organizers I talk to today. I had a study group with Amazon workers reading Fighting Times. You know, Trader Joe's workers are reading it.

So a lot of people are looking at it as an inspiration of how to, how to learn to be an organizer. And one of the last times I got fired was there was a strike by another UAW local in our Kenosha, the town where I was at that time, they had closed the factory in Milwaukee and we had moved to Kenosha. And we decided the bargaining committee that I had then been elected to, which was, you know, the top level of the, ran the union local in the factory, which is about 7,000 people, we had decided to take up a collection

for the strikers at McQuight Wire. And the word went down to the chief stewards and the stewards go up and down the line collecting money. So we used to have these beepers that were about two feet long in those days. That was like the height of technology. You could barely be lug the beeper around with you. And I got beat

and they had fired a chief store. steward that I represented in the engine department and his steward for collecting money for the strike. And they needed me to come over there. So I went over and I said to the superintendent, I said, what did you do? What grounds are you have to fire them? Because I told them not to collect money. I said, but I told them to collect money. And he said, they're not going to collect money. They're fired. I said, you know what? I'm going to go start where they left off collecting money. And you dare to try and stop me. So I went up to this line

and I started collecting money. And people are like, by now it's like, this is like center stage. I mean, it's pretty boring working on second shift on an engine line. And everybody's watching and he's yelling and carrying on. And I'm saying, dude, I'm not leaving.

You don't understand. You know, I'm staying here until I make this collection. You're fucking fired, no, Rod. So then I beat the president of the union, who was a real militant, reform leader, and his wife goes, John, do you need Rudy? And I said, kind of, Connie, I'm fired, the chief steward's fired, and the steward's fired. So 10 minutes, no, excuse me, half hour later, all 15 board members come walking into the plan on

second shift. And they all gather up around me in a circle, and they tell the superintendent, nobody's fired here. So I, nevertheless, I had been fired, so I went to the National Labor Relations Board, and they finally just said, they threw a blanket order on the company, they had a post everywhere on the bulletin board. Don't harass, discriminate against Melrod for anything. Basically, just leave the guy alone, because you're not going to win. You know, now, I don't want to take all the credit,

because it was a militant union. It was a legacy union that went back to the way workers had fought. In that factory, in 1933, there was the first sit-down, which was GM was not till 1937. So it was a very early militant plant where there were socialists or communists, leading it and forming the first collective bargaining agreement. So I was in a good place to be. But regardless, you got to, you know, you got to invest a level of purpose. that you're going to stand up for yourself and your fellow workers if you want to be seen

as a, you know, as a militant and as a socialist that's to be respected. Yeah. And, you know, hearing John talk about all these, all these stories, they're not only deeply informative about the mechanics of class struggle inside of a factory and a workplace. They're not only inspiring, as Henry said, but they're very entertaining. And you could just say, you know, I'm viscerally excited listening to these stories. And I know the book is packed full of many more of them. So if you like hearing this stuff, definitely you're going to find even more fascinating stuff in the book itself. I just wanted to say, going back to that last question I asked you, I know we've moved quite on from the cancer diagnosis, but I'm a father of three, two of my sons are under eight years old.

You know, the prospect of my own death is something I've wrestled with individually. But as a father, I deeply relate to that fear which you talk about in this book of leaving your young children without a father. And so, you know, my heart just swells with happiness that you beat that cancer diagnosis and that you were able to continue living on for your family as well as for all the people you helped afterwards. That's awesome. Thanks very much. And you really do get it if you got kids because my mindset was I'm not leaving. You know, just like I wasn't going to be fired, I'm not leaving, you know. And I think a lot of my fight came from all those earlier struggles I had been in. I mean, at one point, I was. went up to the Menominee Native American Reservation in Wisconsin because there had been an armed takeover by Menominee Warriors. They were all ex-Vietnam vets. There was no hospital care at all on the reservation, and they were demanding a medical care facility, but they had them surrounded by sheriffs, highway patrol, and the White Citizens Council. And they were

gunning at them, shooting at them. Just to show you, these Menominee Warriors, they could take it out everybody who was shooting at them. At one point, one of them, a sheriff was walking with a lantern and it got shot out of his hands by one of the nominee's snipers up in the novitiate, the abbey, where they were. But that was a very dangerous situation because this was right after a wounded knee where they had killed Native American activists. And it was just me and one other organizer who had come up from Milwaukee.

And at first they didn't even, you know, they thought we were FBI agency. didn't want to feed us when they all ate. But we were just, like Henry has said, we were just persistent. We can help you. If we don't help you, they're going to kill those young warriors. And we brought in hundreds of people and the governor backed off and negotiated. I just want to cut in here briefly because what you're talking about right now is actually directly related to the question I was going to ask, which is in the book you talk about there's a certain stage at your time in the union where you decide to bring in other political topics up for discussion amongst union membership outside of just, you know, what can we do inside of our own factory

here? You know, and again, one of these examples is the one that you're describing right now. So I don't want to cut you off entirely from discussing this specific example, but just to throw in the question of, you know, can you talk a little bit about that moment at which you decided the time was right in order for us to try to bring in some more political consciousness into the union outside of just labor struggle within our factory. You know, what are, and again, you talk about this in the book, so, you know, you don't have to go through point by point. I do want to encourage the listeners to read about this because it is fascinating and, you know, very instructive for individuals who are in organizations that are based within their own industry. But, you know,

how did you decide now is the time in order to bring these other? political issues up for discussion within your union? How did you go about communicating this with other people within the union who, you know, let's face it, many of them were not nearly as radical as you, John? You know, how do you go about those other conversations when some people might have the inclination to just say, I'm in a union because I want to fight for my own personal, you know, my own personal union brothers within our factory here? You know, how do you bring up those other political conversations? And then can you talk just a little bit? about some of the things that did come up during those conversations and actions that were carried

out. Again, keeping in mind listeners that you can read more about it inside the book. Yeah, I mean, right off the bat, I understood that we weren't, I wasn't there just to create a better union consciousness. Because that always, just having a strong union consciousness is a great starting point. But capitalism is ripping the hell out of people's lives. I mean, the environment isn't in your factory. The environment is taking place globally. So you always have to be talking about what are the political issues. And that develops people's class consciousness. We're not just there to develop trade union consciousness. That's an important starting point. But to develop class consciousness that their members are a class, a class that's being oppressed, and a class that

has to fight back against the system. So I went in there already having been a warrior against the system in Madison, in high school. And right away, I started talking about the Milwaukee three, who were three Black Panthers, who were on trial for, they were set up. They didn't murder the cop, but they were on trial, and they were eventually sentenced to, to men. years in jail on these murder charges. But I was talking about it the day I got off probation, you know, the day that I felt that I was in the union. And at the same time, I started selling the Milwaukee worker, which was a newspaper put out by the Revolutionary Union. And in Who We Are, it said the Revolutionary Union is a communist organization that works with people of all

different political stripes, but, you know, this is, this is our newspaper. And I would sell it in front of the plant gate. And, well, one of the first times I was selling it, the guys sort of backward workers up on the fifth floor dumped a bucket of glue on my head. But once I made it past that incident, you know, I was sort of undaunted. I kept selling it. And I was in punch out line one day at the clock, and I had a stack of them under my arm, and a group of guys from the fifth floor who had probably thrown the glue, stepped out of line, and they were all Korean war vets, which was, you know, the 50s, which was very, very anti-communists, obviously the McCarthy period. And they started yelling at me, you know, in front of like a couple hundred people,

hey, you're a fucking commie, you know, we're going to bust your ass like we did Roy Webb, Junior, you know, if you don't quit selling that fucking newspaper, I didn't know what Roy Reb Jr. was at that point, but he had been the son of a founding member of the union, Roy Webb Sr., who was a communist, and he had been passing a petition against the Korean War, and they had pushed him down the stairs of the factory, and he had broken his neck. And so it was meant to be a serious challenge. And, you know, I mean, I'm not that big a guy. I'm about five foot six, and I wait about 135 at that point in my life. And this really large black brother steps out of line,

probably six foot five, got cornrows. I mean, he's really in, you know, in shape. And he says, look, you motherfuckers, to the guys that were yelling at me. I just got back from the jungle of Vietnam. I don't know why the fuck I was there. I wasn't fighting an enemy that I chose to fight. In fact, I didn't fight most of the time,

because we didn't believe in the war. And he said, I didn't come back here to let you yell at my man here that he can and cannot say things. He's got a right to free speech and I'm going to protect it. Which was really, you know, a very moving moment in my political career

because, you know, I mean, he didn't know me. I had never met him. And in fact, when I had a book to a release party in Milwaukee, this many years later, from 1972 that was, he came to the Vec at the

bookstore and I introduced him and he talked about some of how we got to know each other. He later became a steward under me and you know, you know, we've maintained our friendship to this day. So to answer your questions

succinctly, there are two struggles. One is the economic struggle. One is the political struggle. While we have to remain rooted in the day-to-day struggle on the shop floor because that's what affects most people. At the same time, we've got to tie those struggles into political struggles that are taking place. Like, we organized a busload of people to go march against the Ku Klux Klan in about 80 or 82 in Tupelo, Mississippi.

And we leafleted the whole plant saying we were going down there to march against the Klan. And, you know, when we came back, we put on a flyer just talking about what we had done down south. And there were, you know, quite a few redneck conservative workers. And I went to the bar after work one of those days. And a guy sitting next to me, I sort of felt this sticking in my stomach. stomach of something. I looked down and he had a 38 in my stomach. And he said, I'm

dead I, D. Marino, and I'm a member of the White People's Nationalist Socialist Party. I'm a Nazi. And you're that fucking commie who puts out, I had had the Jewish commie part to it, to make it full, that puts out that Fighting Times newsletter. And I said,

wow, brother, let's bartender, double shots all around. So we drank we shot those down like you do in Wisconsin with a beard chaser and then I said hit us up with two more shots so now we're into talking

about it I said look dad I didn't we support your steward in trucking department when he was fired for union action yeah you did and didn't we fight to stop the runaway of jobs from this plant yeah you did

I said well look brother we agree on those things so let's leave the political discussion for another time, you know, but we can agree that we are united on fighting American motors for our jobs, for our health and families, et cetera. And after about three hours of doing double shots, he was hugging me, you know, brother, I'm with you all the way. I'm one of your supporters. And from that day on, he, at the plant, every time I was out in front of the plant. He'd greet me. And, you know, I wouldn't say we became friends, but, you know, we had buried that, you know, that, that attitude that he had, which is why I always sort of

come back to when Hillary Clinton called white working class people a basket of deplorables, you know, most people can be won over. Not everybody. There are hardcore MAGA people out there, but most people, if you're working with them, if you're living in their neighborhood, and if you're talking about the same issues they're facing, can be won over, over time. And again, it's like Henry said, it takes persistence. Incredibly interesting. Yeah, how you deal with conservative and even fall on reactionary elements within a union is like a whole story in and of itself and a whole tactical playbook. I have a lot of high school buddies that are in various unions.

and, you know, with a very polarized political environment, of course, these political debates crop up within the context of unions and, you know, Union Brotherhoods, and it's an interesting sort of way to deal with it. But yeah, it sounds like you dealt, at least in that one instance, very well. But I have two questions for you, and you can sort of emphasize either one. I just want to leave it open to you because there's so many stories we could get to, and I love just hearing you talk. One, you mentioned going down and squaring off marching against the KKK. You just talked right now about, you know, having to deal with a Nazi putting a gun to your stomach, or a fascist at least. I was wondering if you could talk about more anti-fascist clashes you might have had, maybe more details about that KKK March. My introduction to left-wing politics in organization actually was anti-fascist organizing locally around here during that 2016 to 2017 moment in which there was a real fascist insurgents in this country. So I'm interested in that. But I'm also interested in your ascension within the union, because you really did reach really interesting heights. So those are two questions. You can take them in any direction you want to, but I just want to throw those out

towards you. Let me start with the ascension in the union, because it really dovetails with a theme that, like I said, Henry's been talking about, which is persistence. The first time I ran for steward, I drove three guys in my car out to the union hall, because that's where the voting took place. So that should have meant I got at least four votes, you know, me and the three guys I drove. So when I got back into the plant the next day, they had the steward results, the results of voting up on the bulletin board in the cafeteria. And being kind of short, I'm trying to like find my name on the list and I can't find it until everybody moves out of the way and I'm on like the last person. And I only got three boats. One of the guys I drove didn't even vote for me. So, you know,

I said to myself, okay, and I was kind of depressed, actually. I admit that day, you know, like, wow, I thought everybody liked me. This is a bummer. But, you know, I just said, hey, I am going to re-devote myself to fighting harder on this shop floor about issues. It doesn't matter if it's a fan that somebody doesn't have or it's too hot to work, whatever it is. And from there on, I just started moving up through the union. I was elected students. I was elected students. I was elected steward again. Then I was elected department chairman, which gave me a huge amount of organizational ability, because that's one of the organizational formats that went back to the beginnings of the union. Each department would have its own meeting once a month so that people would feel much more comfortable going after work to the union headquarters, drinking some beer, talking about departmental problems. So that was a great. sounding board. And I'd love to bring up one of the incidents from that if we have time later. But after that, I was elected chief steward, which means I was steward over both the first

shift and the second shift. And there were probably something like, you know, 14 or 12 stewards, no, no, there was 12 on each shift. So there were quite a few stewards under me. And I led, you know, led them in terms of how the union was going to respond. The first thing I did was, every steward, I said you've got to go through your section every day and check with people, do they have a problem? Do they have an issue? Is everything going okay? People have to feel that the union presence is basically on the present, on the shop floor. And that the stewards have to go back to people and tell them what the resolution to their grievances. Because probably one of the biggest beasts in the union is, I file a grievance and I never know what happens to it.

because it's arbitration, and then it goes to nowhere, you know. So that was a really important process of being able to educate the steward body to being able to practice combat unionism. Unionism that's really a class war unionism, that if you've got to go down and fight it out with the foreman in front of the assembly line, because he's harassing people, then you do it. And from there, I was elected, well, from there, our caucus sent two of us to France because Rayneau, the French automaker, had bought a majority interest in American Motors. And we met with 57 delegates from, I believe, 13 different countries. And I was voted to be on the council of that

body, which that was a great opportunity, because we came back and we really went into D.E. in our newsletter with people about we were no longer part of even just the U.S. working class. We were now part of an international working class. And the way we symbolized it was we had an in-shop artist

who was great at cartoons. And he did a picture of an octopus with all its tentacles. And under one tentacle was an American Motors car. Under another tentacle was a Spanish Reno car. Under another one in South Africa was, you know, the same thing and in France.

And it gave you the understanding because the octopus was wearing a beret. So it was very clear that we were saying we're owned by a French company but were part of an international working class. And interestingly enough, people will say,

oh, come on, those things are pie in the sky. But when they fired a chief steward at the Reno plant in Belgium in, I think, Billboard, wherever in Belgium it was. We started a petition, and right away, a thousand people signed the petition demanding that his job, he'd be given his job back.

So people began to look at things much more from a worldwide perspective as time went on. And from there, I was elected to the UAW International Convention in 83, where our look. local led a fight for one member one vote because we had never had the right to vote for international officers. And only the delegates that were very few and far between and usually part of the caucus, the administration caucus that ran the international. They did the electing and they voted for administration caucus reps. And we fought it out on the floor for one member one

vote. We did not win, but Fraser, who is president of the UAW at the time, told the press that we had mounted the largest opposition vote to anything he had taken on and his history as a president. Then three years later, the New Dawn Caucus again fought on the floor. And then this year, last year, for the first time, it was submitted to the membership. do they want one member one vote and it passed. And as a result, we have this new reform leadership that is leading the strike that people know about today all over the country to, I mean, that strike is so vital because it really has to do with the whole future of the working class in this country.

Because basically, it's about the new technology. It's about electronic EV cars, EV buses, EV trucks. And the fight is an existential fight. If auto workers are going to continue to be represented by a union, we've got to take on those battles to spread the union to those plants in the South that are non-union. Yes. And just to pop in really quick, I just released an episode on Rev Left Radio with two labor journalists about the UAW strike talking about all the causes behind it, the implications. And we discuss in some detail that exact vote where Sean Fane, the president that people are probably seeing as the face of this stand-up strike

launched by the UAW was a product of this one member, one vote process. More democracy within the union is basically shorthand for what that means. And so you being a part of all the history leading up to that is incredibly fascinating and connects those two episodes and those two stories quite well. So anybody interested in more details on that, definitely go check that out. But you can continue on, John. Well, no, people should really check it out because Sean Fane is an interesting guy. He was an electrician. He wasn't a union bureaucrat. He was an electrician in an assembly plant. And he's the first union representative that I've ever heard refer to were involved in a class war. It's a class war between us, the working class and the billionaire

class. And that's exactly what we've been talking about. Developing a class consciousness among workers that who they're fighting is much broader than just one industry or one boss. So, you know, hopefully he will continue on that path, Sean Fane, and hopefully the Reform Caucus will really take hold in the UAW and, you know, continue to create these militant struggles that we've got to win. I mean, it's no different than the Actors Guild and the Screenwriters Guild, where they're going to be replaced by AI. If they don't fight to save their jobs, to stop AI from writing script and actually being the actors, you know, it's the same technological battle that we're waging in the auto industry right now. Just to circle back to the other question

that Brett had asked about the KKK March, anti-KKKK March. Yeah, I mean, let's just put it this way. I mean, going into a factory, particularly in the polarized rule that we live in, you're going to you're going to have to learn how to deal with people, you know, who have all kinds of political views. I mean all kinds of views. I mean, from the bizarre to the conspiratorial, to the anti-communist, to the, you know, red-baiting, what have you. But let me give you one other lesson that's really recent. I've been working with the UAWD, unite all workers for democracy, which is a caucus within the UAW. And we've been phone banking

UAW members this was before the strike trying to talk to them about the key issues and why the strike might be necessary and you know you're just randomly calling people so what the first thing that was obvious to me was people are angry

I had never seen auto workers that dispersed as a group who all echoed the same anger at the auto companies but then I was talking to a guy who told me that he had worked at GM for 45 years. So we used to call that a lifer.

I mean, you've been there 45 years, you know, your kind of your life is auto. And he started telling me, we're talking about the contract, I'm talking about the main issues, and somehow he brings up Donald Trump. And he says, well, you know, Trump was the best president for the workers.

And I said, well, I don't really think so, brother, because if you look at it, he only lowered taxes for the rich. He didn't lower your taxes. He didn't lower my taxes. And then I moved down. I said, look, we've been talking about this two-tier system in auto, where younger workers get paid less, get less pension rights, et cetera. He says, I will go to the mat and strike for those to get rid of that two-tier system.

And, all right, I didn't have enough time to try and convince him not to be a trumper. But, you know, I found the point of unity where we could both, where he was willing with 45, years to go out there and fight for young guys who've been there two years, three years, whatever. And so there's that affinity that workers feel with each other that's exemplary of where we have to start and then move from there to raise consciousness, to raise political issues. You know, there were, I mean, you know, in Milwaukee, we used to have to go out and demonstrate against brown shirts, You know, you know, this current day Nazis would be marching around, you know, in those days they were luckily only, you know, 10 or 15 of them. They look foolish because we would come out with hundreds of people. But it's been a, you know, it's been something that has been, you know, an issue that has to be fought going way, way back to, you know, the turn of the last century. So it's not something that's going to disappear. It's something that we've just got to take on like any of these other struggles. And I'm sure it'll be a struggle that your kids will be taking on where hopefully we'll move further by then.

Well, we've been talking for some time about your time at the AMC factories, plural, Milwaukee and Kenosha, and your time in the union. But, of course, the book leaves off as you leave from AMC to pursue legal studies and then a legal career. and, of course, also mentioning about, you know, your cancer diagnosis, which we had talked about previously and overcoming that terminal cancer diagnosis, which of course we are thrilled that, you know, this has a very happy ending. But I do want to take us a little bit to your legal career as well, which I know, again, is outside of the purview of the book, but listeners that want to know more about your legal career, it's on your website, which, again, is jonathanmelrod.com, correct? That's correct. Okay. So you also have taken up some very interesting, you know, avenues within law. As you mentioned previously in the conversation, you were looking at cases regarding individuals who were assassinated or murdered by the police. But also you worked with migrant rights. So I'm wondering if you can talk with us a little bit about that leaving that decision to leave AMC to pursue, you know, law school and then entering the legal field and kind of the avenues that you took within the legal field, just in brief. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's funny. One of the things that just remind me when you talked about having to deal with, you know, conservatives in a polarized society,

I mean, when I was doing the work defending, you know, or charging the police and arguing against the police for having committed these assassinations, um, I assume it was the county sheriffs, because that's who we were dealing with, left a note in my mailbox that I'd better stop or I was going to face dire consequences. So, you know, that goes on in life, you know, once you decide you're going to stand up, you know, people are going to try and sit you back down. But when I first got out of law school, I went into the practice of refugee asylum law. And we had, soon had the largest asylee practice in San Francisco and represented well over thousand clients in pursuing claims for asylum. You know, and it's, I don't know if people caught it on the news, but the Canadian government just charged the Indian government with having sent agents to murder and assassinate a Sikh, an Indian Sikh in Canada. on Canadian soil because he was an advocate of creating a separate state in Punjab,

which is where Sikhs mostly live in India. So we represented probably 500 Sikhs who were involved in the struggle against India for a separate state that's called Khalistan in the Punjab, in Punjab state. So, you know, and I represented people who were young Tamil. you know, from Sri Lanka, who had been persecuted by the military, accused of being Tomil Tigers, you know, insurgents, and they were just young people. And they were being just cast in, you know, with any young people who the police were going after. And I was able to win them political asylum. You know, and there were many, I mean, so many Sikhs we wound political

asylum for it. And I felt really good about that work. And it was, you know, really you know, when you're representing a woman who's been raped in a Indian police station because her last name is Cowr, K-A-U-R, which is the name that most seek women take as their last name, you can really feel that the oppression that a lot of people live with outside of the United States, not to say we don't have our issues and our oppression here, but, you know, out there in the world, it's one tough place to, you know, stand up for. for your rights. I mean, one other guy ad was a journalist

in Pakistan and he caught the Muslim League who were the Conservative Party stuffing the ballot box against Benazir Bhutto in the Pakistan People's Party and he took pictures of it and they saw him taking pictures of it

and they came after him and they stripped him and he put the pictures in his underwear. And because of sort of Muslim code. They couldn't make him take his underwear all. So he managed to sneak out of the country and I represented him here. And he won political asylum and he actually had Benazir Bhutto call us at the office and she thanked us for having won his case because he had been such an impactful journalist publishing in the New Dawn newspaper that the corruption of the Muslim

League, which is what was going after her Democratic, more Democratic, Pakistan People's Party. So, you know, I had those cases, and I also, you know, worked on in music, in Latin Alternative Rock, which was a lot of fun being in the music business. And it was rock that grew out of Argentina and Mexico City in 68. In Mexico City, they had killed the students who were protesting the Olympics.

And in Argentina, there was the dictatorship that was disappearing leftists and activists, you know, by the hundreds and thousands. And this was the music of protests. When young people couldn't go out into the streets, when they were under, you know, a suppressive regime, rock music became their expression of rebellion. So we put out that music for, I think, about five years, you know, being part of what was called combat rock all over the world. world. People may have heard of Manu Chow, who was, you know, one of the key figures in the combat rock music scene. Well, John, you've been incredibly generous with your time. So we don't want to ask too many more questions, although honestly there is a lot of further directions that we could take with the conversation. But we do have two kind of closing questions. I'll take mine first and then Brett can follow up with his afterwards. So this is more a question of reflection for you. So

looking back and of course you know I don't want to say you're old John but you know we are talking about events that took place in the 60s and 70s we'll say you are very experienced and wise and you do have a lot of experiences that you can look back on and this book is a great reflection of that even though like I said it does leave off that second kind of phase of your your career that legal part of your career. And when you look back to your life, you know, your militant activism in the union, your student activism, and then your legal career afterwards, what are some of the things that you're particularly pleased with when you think back and think, you know,

hey, that's something that I did. That's something that I struggled on. Even if it wasn't a success in the moment, I know we talked about, you know, the one person, one vote decision, which wasn't passed in your lifetime, but eventually, you know, we did see that was something that you worked on in the early phases. You know, it wasn't a success at that moment, but looking back, you can see that you were kind of laying the groundwork in many ways for things that then developed, you know, in the decades to come. So looking back, what are some of the things that you're particularly proud of, that you're particularly pleased with

your involvement in from that whole span of time from, you know, going into university and having those student movements that you were involved with all the way through your legal career, which, you know, spans many decades and many different fields as well. I mean, I think that there really is a lot to be proud about here. Well, I really appreciate you saying that. And, you know, somebody once asked me, wow, would you do this again? And, um, And my answer was, yeah, I would do it all over again. And if pancreatic cancer was part of the consequence of being willing to do it, then I would accept that. I mean, I don't say that cavalierly because I know, you know, how difficult it is for people who have cancer.

So I'd say that for me, somebody said, did you enjoy it? And my answer was, yeah, it was a blast. I mean, I love the camaraderie and the unity and being able to stand up with people and encourage them to fight for their rights. I mean, that's what really makes my life something that I'm proud of and something that I'm continuing to do. We didn't even get into mentioning that I'm very active in the struggle in the Philippines, where there's a very active liberation struggle. and my wife being Filipino were both involved. And if you get in the book, there's a picture of us in the jail with political prisoners meeting where we had set up a library. So, you know, I feel like that's always been, you know, that I've been true to my beliefs,

no matter how difficult it was to hold on to those. and how sometimes frightening, like being on the Menominee Reservation, where the way that the Native Americans could prove that I wasn't a FBI agent was they told me, you're going to be the first guy in the front of the march when we get to the police line. So if anybody gets shot, it's you.

And I got to say, I mean, we were marching toward the police lines and they had goddamn, you know, what they call it, grease guns, machine guns. And, you know, here we are chanting, you know, against the cops and against, you know, the fact that they're, you know, boxed in the Menominee warriors. And you don't know if they're going to open fire, you know, and you've got to really, you know, put your faith in the fact that, you know, this is all worth it. That there's been many revolutions in history. and this is another one of those periods when hopefully we'll be able to lead people

out of the morass that we're in, out of the existential crisis that we're facing, like the climate, and to do that, it requires activists, it requires persistence, and it requires dedication, and a willingness to do what has to be done. The most proud thing that I can look back on

was when I did leave, in 1985, and I believe it was, we didn't get into that question. You asked it, but I left a lot because the plant was, basically the writing was on the wall, that deindustrialization was coming, and the plant would eventually be shutting down. It was when I went to law school. But Rudy Kuzel, the president of the union, who I mentioned earlier, who was a true militant and a true, you know, honest, hard-fighting trade unionists. This quote was from him in the newspaper. The same paper that wrote

Melrod 7 NLB 0 wrote, Rudy wrote, Melrod leaves for law school with a 70 record at the NRLB versus AMC. Rudy went on to say, Local 72's loss is somebody else's gain.

He'll always be, out there trying to correct injustice. He'll be there with integrity, caring about people, and trying to help them. So that's what I've tried to do with my life. And I hope people will be interested to buy the book. As you said, it's at go to p.m.press.org. It's fighting times, organizing on the front lines of the class war, and put in the discount code fighting in capital letters, and you'll get a 40% discount. thanks to both Henry and Brett and those people who listen to this, and hopefully you will follow up with the book. And then if you want to, you know, get back with me, which a lot of people

have, you can do that through the website. So thanks a lot, guys, and I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Yeah, just a huge solidarity with the comrades in the Philippines, the new people's army, fighting, you know, holding the line for global revolution, solidarity with the UAW workers on strike. Yeah, I just wanted to say, John, your entire life has been a gift to humanity. You've turned it into a gift to humanity and to our future. You're a real working class hero. We salute you 110%. We highly encourage everybody. Go get the book. Share it with friends. Support John. 100%. As the very last question before we let you go, do you have any last words, any words of advice for maybe young organizers in or outside the labor movement? Anything you want to say as we

officially wrap up this wonderful conversation. Actually, I do. And this is, to me, a really key issue. A lot of people, and particularly the bourgeois press, loves to talk about how, you know, this is no longer an industrial country. And, you know, there's no longer a, you know, working class. And the fact is that there are two. industrial powers in the world today. There's China and there's in the U.S. And in the U.S., that industry is in

the southeast. That's where all the new auto plants are being built, the EV plants, the battery plants, et cetera. And I want to really encourage young people, anywhere you go to organize is great. But if you really want to devote yourself to where things need to be done, it's in the south. It's going into those unorganized plants that need to be organized. If I was younger, I would go into the Tesla plant because what can be better than fucking with Elon Musk every day of your life? So, you know, that's one suggestion. But basically, this is still an industrial country. We still got a lot of work to do in organizing.

And I hope people will come away from this making a decision that they're going to continue that kind of organizing. Yeah, absolutely. Wonderful words to close on. As John had said, and as we had previously mentioned, the book is Fighting Times, Organizing on the Frontlines of the Class War. You can get it from PM Press with 40% off with code fighting in all capital letters. Thanks a lot, John. It was great to talk to you. As we had mentioned, your website is available at Jonathan Melrod.com.

That's J-O-N-A-T-H-A-Melrod.com. You're also on Twitter. What's your Twitter handle? for listeners who want to follow up with you there as well. I'm a little bit tech neophyte. Well, I think it's just Jonathan Melrodden. We'll link to it in the show notes in any case. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Of course. And it was a pleasure to speak with you. Really enjoyed the book. I mean, really, I can't emphasize enough, but it was a pleasure to read not only from reading these stories, but also you write in a way that the way that John speaks is the way that he writes. So if you enjoyed listening to him, you'll also enjoy reading him.

So thank you very much, John. All right. Thank you both. Brett, how can the listeners find you in the other work that you do? Yeah. Thank you so much, John. You can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Absolutely highly recommend the listeners do that.

As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, the translation of Stalin history and critique of a black legend that Salvatore Angled de Morrow and myself did, of Domenicole, Sertos, Classic is available from Iskra Books.org. The PDF is available for free. So download it and send it to people. I mean, the more people with it on their screens, the better. And if you're like me and you prefer print books,

you can also order a paperback or hardcover copy. They're pretty much printed at cost. So they're very affordable in either case. As for the show, you can help support us. Keep us on the air by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history, and you can follow us on Twitter to keep up with everything that we're putting out individually and collectively at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod.

So until next time, listeners, Solidarity. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.