Mike Westfall was offered a job at Solidarity House, the UAW’s headquarters in Detroit. It would’ve meant a pay raise and a second pension, but Westfall said he turned it down, because he wasn’t in it for the money.
Today, Westfall can only look at his once-precious union and shake his head at the thousands and thousands of layoffs and at the federal probes into corruption at Solidarity House.
“We had 80,000 workers in Flint, at the time,” Westfall said recently. “Now it’s closer to 10 (thousand). So I was right on all this stuff, unfortunately.”
Unions “were very effective back then,” he added, “because they put the cause above themselves. Today, it’s themselves above the cause.”