A "Union for the Poor": The Labor History of Welfare Activism in Detroit

• In Event: Remembering the 1960s

Abstract

"Work" is a socially constructed category of activity, and its boundaries are continually redrawn under the pressures of particular historical conditions. A "labor union" is a representative body that advocates on behalf of a collective of "workers"—a social designation often limited to those who receive wages. After the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, Detroiters' avenues of dissent changed as forms of industrial waged work became scarcer and as the social power of traditional labor unions attenuated. Although Detroit's working class residents had fewer opportunities to agitate for better conditions in the waged workplace—the realm of "productive" labor—some activists in the city sought ways to improve their lives in their households and communities—the realm of re-productive, unwaged labor, or social reproduction. Of course, for many of the African American women who lived in Detroit, the boundary between these two spaces of work had little practical meaning: Maidy Jordan, Vice President of the Westside Mothers, made this clear when she compared the humiliation of being accused of stealing by a white woman whose house she was employed to clean to the humiliation of going on welfare when she needed to pay emergency medical bills for her child.

The Westside Mothers, founded in 1965 and later an affiliate of the National Welfare Rights Organization, were a representative body, led by mothers on welfare who advocated for just treatment from utility companies, local schools, the Detroit Housing Commission, and the local welfare office. One commentator, who described them as a "bargaining agent for welfare recipients" and a "union for the poor" was careful to note that groups like the Westside Mothers were "not labor unions but unions of persons within a geographic area." The Westside Mothers looked like a labor union, and they talked like a labor union, but because they were not advocating for workers, the logic went, they were not quite a labor union.

This paper takes seriously the idea that the Westside Mothers were a labor union. Drawing from the correspondence, ephemera, and organizational records of Detroit Welfare Rights organizations active from the 1960s to the 1980s, it rethinks who was "working," how these workers were organized, and how they struggled for a better future in post-1967 Detroit. Labor history analyses of Detroit have overemphasized the importance of the waged workplace, putting social reproduction and its practitioners under erasure. The literature on welfare policy and activism has been more attentive to social reproduction, but it would benefit from the application of labor history's enduring analytical emphases, including the organization and cooperation of workers, struggles over remuneration and the length of the working day, and the withholding of labor as a lever of resistance. By arguing that welfare activism was a form of labor unionism, I aim to challenge the pervasive declension narrative about the possibilities of dissent in late-twentieth century Detroit by revealing local opposition to global processes of dispossession. More broadly, I suggest labor history's urgent need to expand the boundaries of work and resistance.

Author

• Robert Ramaswamy, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor