Labor Day Book Event

Deeply personal, astutely political, Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War recounts the thirteen-year journey of Jon Melrod to harness working-class militancy and jump start a revolution on the shop floor of American Motors. Melrod faces termination, dodges the FBI, outwits collaborators in the UAW, and becomes a central figure in a lawsuit against the rank-and-file newsletter Fighting Times, as he strives to build a class-conscious workers’ movement from the bottom up.

A radical to the core, Melrod was a key part of campus insurrection at University of Wisconsin Madison. He left campus for the factory in 1972, hired along with hundreds of youthful job seekers onto the mind-numbing assembly line, Fighting Times paints a portrait of these rebellious and alienated youthful hires, many of whom were Black Vietnam vets.

Containing dozens of archival photographs, Fighting Times captures the journey of a militant anti-racist revolutionary who rose to the…