"Anybody watching this right now who went to college, or got to put their child through college, anybody who's living in a house, has three square meals a day, that was all because of what happened with that strike in Flint." – Michael Moore on The War Room with Jennifer Granholm, December 12th, 2012, discussing Michigan's new right-to-work law. (Granholm was Michigan's Governor from January 2003-January 2011, and was succeeded by lying, Koch Brothers-owned Republican, Rick Snyder.)

"That strike in Flint" was the basis for Moore's first documentary, "Roger & Me," about the laid off auto workers of General Motors in Flint, Michigan. Many of those original UAW sit-down strikers from Flint were on hand for the "right to work" protest in Lansing on Tuesday. They included ninety-one-year-old Geraldine Blankinship, and this gentleman, whose name I didn't catch sadly, who also happened to be celebrating his 96th birthday.

Michael Moore is a native of Michigan, attended the University of Michigan, and is the son and grandson of auto workers. His uncle LaVerne was one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers labor union and participated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike.

The President of United Auto Workers local 5285, Ricky McDowell, said that organized labor supports President Barack Obama because he saved their jobs.

“With the help of President Obama saving the Big Three, with the stimulus money, it saved the GM and Chrysler brothers and sisters. So without the support of the international union from Detroit, and if we had let Chrysler and Chevrolet and GM go down, there wouldn’t be a Big Three, there wouldn’t be an international union,” he told PBS during a Labor Day parade in Charlotte, North Carolina. “So he did save our jobs.”

Several hundred union members, drummers and step teams marched in the parade while chanting pro-union and pro-Obama slogans, hoping to draw attention to the fact that North Carolina is the nation’s least unionized state.

The Democratic National Convention is being held in Charlotte this year, beginning Tuesday, September 4th, and UAW president Bob King and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka are both scheduled to speakers.

"For the fired auto workers who were twisted, tricked and robbed / To the
peasant in Guatemala in a sweatshop got your job / And she can't feed
her family on the pennies that she makes / Meanwhile the crime
rate's rising up and down the Great Lake states"