“Since When Is It Insolent and Insubordinate to Want a Safe Place to Work?” Labor, Law, and Politics in 1970s Detroit

In the workmen’s compensation and personal injury practices of Detroit’s left-wing movement lawyers, compensation law was used in three overlapping ways: as a source of funding for the law firms’ non-paying political work, a form of material redistribution (however flawed) from entities with economic power to the people they harmed, and as a legal tactic mobilized in support of grassroots activism. This paper focuses on the third use of compensation law, tracing the lead-up and following the outcome of the August 1973 wildcat strike at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant. Fueled by years of increasingly dilapidated conditions and sparked by several serious injuries, the struggle between workers, their union, and the auto company for control over conditions on the shop floor spilled into the legal system in both traditional and unorthodox ways. The lawyers of Glotta, Adelman, Dinges, a radical left law firm, attempted to defend against a labor injunction, widen the definition of a “safety strike,” get a civil rights verdict against Chrysler and the United Auto Workers for the termination of the three men who led the wildcat, and obtain unemployment and workmen’s compensation for those three fired workers. This paper argues for broadening our understanding of both the work of radical lawyers and the political uses of compensation law, and adds to the literature around dissident unionism in the 1970s.