Peter Friedlander documents the formation of a local United Automobile Workers union at a mid-sized parts factory during the turbulent 1930s. Blending oral history based on personal interviews with a keen analysis of the worker's class structure and widely varied cultural backgrounds, Freidlander describes the transformation of a working-class community by its own actions and the ensuing stratification and factionalizing within that union. The result is a firsthand account of the experience of unionization in personal and social terms.

Race against Liberalism examines how black worker activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. David M. Lewis-Colman traces the substantive, long-standing disagreements between liberals and the black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action. As he shows, black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. The book covers the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s; the black power movement and Revolutionary Union Movements of the mid-1960s; and the independent race-based activism of the 1970s that resulted in Coleman Young's 1973 election as the city's first black mayor.