Auto workers on strike stand in front of the General Motors paint facility in southwest Flint, October 2019. In the first month of my fieldwork in Flint, a nation-wide United Auto Workers strike against General Motors broke out that would last about forty days. The early days of the strike overlapped with the climate strikes that took place worldwide. This synchronicity pushed me to think about the power of the strike as an instrument of protest, about the uses and targets of this kind of political action. If you were to walk or drive through this intersection, all you would hear is the virtually uninterrupted sound of car horns sounding their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm for the strikers. On Tennessee picket lines, so much bottled water got donated to strikers that they sent it to Flint in an act of solidarity not only for the strike but for the water crisis. Automobile manufacturing has been the primary economic basis of life in Flint from the twentieth century onwards, and the deindustrialization of the last few decades has produced a situation of contemporary turmoil as working people struggle to re-organize their lives around the increasingly unstable capital-labor relationship as it plays out locally in Michigan and the rest of the Rust Belt. The apparent tension between a strike for jobs firmly rooted in a fossil fuel economy and a strike for environmental protection reminds us that solidarity is a challenge to create, not a given reality we can take for granted. And for Flint, in a time of environmental crisis as well as labor crisis, a perennial question presents itself with renewed urgency: can the coalition-building capacities of a strike, if further developed and organized, enliven broader collective action against Flint’s toxic conditions?
Auto workers on strike stand in front of the General Motors paint facility in southwest Flint, October 2019. In the first month of my fieldwork in Flint, a nation-wide United Auto Workers strike against General Motors broke out that would last about forty days. The early days of the strike overlapped with the climate strikes that took place worldwide. This synchronicity pushed me to think about the power of the strike as an instrument of protest, about the uses and targets of this kind of political action. If you were to walk or drive through this intersection, all you would hear is the virtually uninterrupted sound of car horns sounding their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm for the strikers. On Tennessee picket lines, so much bottled water got donated to strikers that they sent it to Flint in an act of solidarity not only for the strike but for the water crisis. Automobile manufacturing has been the primary economic basis of life in Flint from the twentieth century onwards, and the deindustrialization of the last few decades has produced a situation of contemporary turmoil as working people struggle to re-organize their lives around the increasingly unstable capital-labor relationship as it plays out locally in Michigan and the rest of the Rust Belt. The apparent tension between a strike for jobs firmly rooted in a fossil fuel economy and a strike for environmental protection reminds us that solidarity is a challenge to create, not a given reality we can take for granted. And for Flint, in a time of environmental crisis as well as labor crisis, a perennial question presents itself with renewed urgency: can the coalition-building capacities of a strike, if further developed and organized, enliven broader collective action against Flint’s toxic conditions?