A luncheon guaranteed to last a long time... and the following events

As if I hadn’t stumbled upon enough odd connections coming to Detroit, I got to hear the author of the book I am currently devouring speak at the AFL-CIO Labor Luncheon two days ago. Steve Babson, author of Working Detroit , spoke of historic events in labor history and the ways in which their context parallels the current state of Detroit.

He mentioned the waiters’ strike of 1921. At the time, the service employees union only worked with white males, and encouraged the all-white, all-male wait staff working at a country club to strike. As soon as the waiters did, the management of the country club decided that black men could wait tables just as well as whites. The black men were not included in the union so they took the jobs offered, and the strike failed.

The necessity for inclusiveness has not disappeared, Babson pointed out. Undocumented workers are often in much the same position as blacks at the time of the waiters’ failed strike. The labor community must recognize the importance of including all workers, not only for the workers' sake, but also for the success of the union.

He started wrapping up by calling us to pursue a “vision as daring as the actions necessary to obtain it.” We cannot continue to work within a structure that has brought us to this point of economic disparity. Not only is action imperative, but action driven by a vision for a different world. (Which happens to be similar to the tagline for the USSF.)

I ate seated between a UAW retiree and Pastor John Pitts, the President of the IWJ Board of Directors, and across from Tanise Hill, the secretary to the president of the Metro-Detroit AFL-CIO. Pastor Pitts is a wonderful man, and was fasting. He was not fasting, as I originally thought, in solidarity with Muslims during Ramadan, but rather in prayer for someone he knew whose home was being foreclosed. I don’t think Tanise sat down for the entirety of the luncheon, she had so many people to see and talk to. She could easily be described as “a character,” and she knows absolutely everyone. She’s good at it though, and when I called her just this morning to reschedule the Board meeting, she told me she had a found a book I should read.

Once the luncheon ended (3 hours after it had begun) a few tables were pushed together and 30 people stayed to meet concerning the labor committee of the US Social Forum.

Steve Babson stayed to find out about the USSF, along with Rev. Rowe, IWJ Board member of the Central United Methodist church (where my office is), Iris Pita, IWJ Board member, Saundra Williams, President of the Detroit AFL-CIO and IWJ Board member, Brenda Moon, of the National AFL-CIO office. Fran Tobin from Jobs with Justice and Charles Williams, a Baptist minister facilitated the meeting. These names probably don’t mean much to most of you, but I keep finding business cards in different parts of my office, and people keep mentioning lots of the same names, so it’s very exciting for me to finally meet the people that match all of these newly familiar names.

The USSF meeting took maybe 30 minutes, and Dave Ivers, Bill Wylie-Kellerman, and I met after that. We picked yet another table in the union hall and sat to discuss my role with the Board, the division of my time, and my involvement with various campaigns. It was great to meet with both my supervisors at once, and it looks like I will spending half my time on preparing for the USSF. Four and a half hours, and three tables later, we left the IBEW union hall. Dave for some reason had bought toilet paper as a housewarming gift for us poor JVs. So I drove back to Central United Methodist with toilet paper in the trunk and one more meeting to go.

Rev. Rowe is a new addition to the IWJ Board, so rather than discussing his past involvement with IWJ he listed off various groups that operate within the church and whose members are oftentimes part of his congregation: (NOAH, Westside Mothers, Welfare Rights, Swords into Plowshares, and more…) He also explained much of his work with the labor movement, and he has done a lot! He started community organizing on the Southside of Chicago before he was done with the seminary. Recently, he allowed his church to be used as a meeting place for Workers United (formerly the local chapter of UNITE HERE) when their decision to split from the regional group caused a huge conflict. The regional group tried to crash one of their meetings, and Rev. Rowe himself asked them to leave. He signs his emails and ends his prayers: “Grace, Peace, and Power.”

I got home, changed, sent an email about the Board Meeting. At seven Imam Dawud Walid (Executive Director of the Michigan branch of Council on American-Islamic Relations - CAIR) picked me up for a tour of Detroit –my third- and to break fast. This time I was driven through Hamtramck and Dearborn. Both of these areas reminded much more of Chicago than any part of Detroit that I've seen so far. He pointed out all sorts of wonderful, hole-in-the-wall, family owned restaurants serving food from Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, there were Polish sausage places, Bosnian mosques, and Indian dessert shops next to Arabic music stores. And people were walking everywhere!

We ended up at a Pakistani restaurant at 8:00, exactly 18 minutes before the fast was to be broken. Our waitress suspected that I wasn't Muslim (I didn't look like her normal customers she told me) and she brought me some water. At 8:18 the buffet opened, and we loaded our plates with lamb, rice, a spicy lentil and spinach combination, and all sorts of things I didn't quite recognize. We ordered naan and mango lassis, and spent most of the meal talking about Islam. I quite enjoyed myself. Before dropping me off at home, Dawud gave me a cd of Senegalese music he had found at a West African market. And I found out that he loves ataaya. The next thing to do is find someone who speaks French- but at this pace I'm guessing it will happen soon. I feel as though I'm falling very quickly and easily into a network of generous, diverse, and intriguing people- and somehow it is considered my job!