A Hawaiian shirt branded with union logos that wouldn’t look out of place on a hypebeast runway. Political cartoons roasting Ronald Reagan’s anti-labor policies. Rusty weapons recovered from violent strikes. All of that and more can be found in the Reuther archives, an exhaustive repository of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union’s artifacts from a century of strikes.
The US is in the midst of the first strike by workers at all the big three car companies of Detroit in 80 years. It’s been a galvanizing moment for autoworkers, with Joe Biden making a historic visit to the picket line.