This project is a report on the documentary "Roger and Me" by Michael Moore. The main focus is on the impact of GM factories closure on the life of people and the city of Flint, Michigan as a whole. Project includes information on how unions were formed and operated; bargaining process and power; strikes that took place during that time.

1. Mariya Kolechyna
December 14th, 2011

2. “ROGER AND ME”
Mariya Kolechyna
December 14th, 2011

5. is a feature-length
documentary film chronicling the efforts of
the world's largest corporation, General
Motors, as it turns its hometown of Flint,
Michigan, into a ghost town. In his quest to
discover why GM would want to do such a
thing, filmmaker Michael Moore, a Flint
native, attempts to meet the chairman, Roger
Smith, and invite him out for a few beers up in
Flint to "talk things over". In between his efforts
to see Smith, Moore, the son of a Flint
autoworker, takes us on a bizarre journey
through Flint.

6. people standing in line at one location to
collect federal surplus cheese and butter;
• Large sections of the city filled with abandoned
homes and boarded up stores, looking more like a
war zone than an American town;
people who have lost their homes and their
life savings and have packed up and headed
south in search of work;
• The social cost of 25% unemployment: record
rates of suicide, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and,
surpassing Miami and Detroit as the city with the
highest rate of violent crime.

7. • 50% of Flint's GM workforce will have been abolished by
1989, an event of unprecedented proportion in American
history.
• Yet, since 1983, car sales have steadily risen and GM has
posted record profits of nearly $19 billion!
• Moore points out that he and his friends were raised on the
American Dream which promised that if you worked hard
and the company prospered, you would too. Now, it
seems,
.

8. .
During the Great Depression, unemployment was
high. Many employers tried to get as much work as
possible from their employees for the lowest possible
wage.
Workers were upset with:
1. The speedup of assembly lines
2. Working conditions
3. The lack of job security
Seeking strength in unity, they formed unions.

9. Automobile workers organized the
in 1935
GM would not recognize the U.A.W. as the
workers' bargaining representative.

10. Hearing rumors that G.M. was moving work to
factories where the union was not as strong, workers
in Flint began a sit-down strike on December 30, 1936.
The sit-down was an effective way to strike. When
workers walked off the job and picketed a plant,
management could bring in new workers to break
the strike. If the workers stayed in the plant,
management could not replace them with other
workers.

11. At 8 p.m. on December 30, 1936, in one of the first sit-
down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupy
the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in
Flint, Michigan.
The autoworkers were striking to win:
 Recognition of the United Auto Workers (UAW) as
the only bargaining agent for GM's workers;
Wanted to make the company stop sending work
to non-union plants;
To establish a fair minimum wage scale, a
grievance system and a set of procedures that would
help protect assembly-line workers from injury.

12. On the night of December 30, the majority of employees who
had been working their shift at Fisher 1 and Fisher 2 left the
plants. Some left only to celebrate the New Year and
returned later. Others took up picket and food-gathering
activities on the outside. The lives of those who remained on
the inside for the duration quickly fell into a disciplined and
organized pattern. Committees for such things as cleaning
up, exercise, security, entertainment, and defense were
quickly assembled, and the property of the company was
strictly kept from harm. This discipline and organization was
maintained through the insistence of strike leaders Bob Travis
and Roy Reuther, both of whom were already veterans of this
new way of striking.

14. Realizing that it could capitalize on its victory over GM, the UAW set
out to boost its membership in the aftermath of the sit-down strike.
The union:
 Increased staff,
 Lowered initiation fees,
 Stepped up recruitment efforts all with remarkable results.
With only 88,000 dues-paying members at the settlement of the Flint
strike in February 1937, the organization grew close to 400,000
members by October of that year, making it one of the largest
labor organizations in the country. While historians often credit the
Wagner Act for increasing UAW membership, the Flint sit-down strike
clearly played a critical role as well.

15.  As one Fisher One employee noted, worker morale
had greatly improved as a result of the strike:
"The inhuman high speed is no more. We now have a
voice, and have slowed up the speed of the line. And
[we] are now treated as human beings, and not part of
the machinery. . . . It clearly proves that united we
stand, divided or alone we fall“.
 The Flint strike boosted union membership not only in
automobile manufacturing, but in other mass-
production industries as well.

16.  The Flint strike also dramatically increased the
popularity of the sit-down strike as a bargaining
tool among union organizers and disgruntled
workers. Only 48 of the 2,712 strikes in 1936 were
sit-down strikes, compared to 477 of 4,740 strikes
the following year.

17.  Amazing movie – necessary to watch!
 Ugly truth of the corporate world – FOR PROFIT!
 Ideas:
a. Government of Flint – why make the whole city dependant on
one company?
b. GM – could have provided families that worked for them for their
whole lives with training, recruitment sessions, resume writing skills
- anything that would help them survive that rapid change.
 Labor and unions proved themselves heroes once again by
setting an example of how to fight for their rights.
 US Government – provide assistance in resolving this issue –
helping GM generate the same amount of money they would
save going overseas at home.