Early Sunday evening, the bus entered downtown Detroit and pulled into Central United Methodist Church, a church active in fights for!
social justice. We were welcomed by a crowd including Marian Kramer, co-president with Cheri of the National Welfare Rights Union. Local organizers fed us dinner and shuttled us to showers as we put up our tents in the parking lot. After breakfast the next morning, we gathered inside the church for a human rights tribunal organized by the Michigan Welfare Rights Union.
The tribunal was begun with an inspiring speech by Maureen Taylor, president of the MWRU. Many people testified, both Freedom Bus riders and Detroit residents, and economic human rights violations from Detroit were documented. The judges at the tribunal included community and church members, leadership from the local National Organization for Women, and organized labor. An organizer!
speaking for 2,000 striking Detroit newspaper workers said, "The one thing we've learned in this strike is that we're all in this together: working poor, unemployed, black, white... everybody." A member of the United Farm Workers returned a "guilty" verdict for the United States' violations of economic human rights.
After the tribunal we loaded the bus and drove to nearby Ypsilanti, where we had lunch and exchanged information about our struggles for economic human rights. We left Ypsilanti with the Genesse County welfare rights group to show the support of the New Freedom Bus for the striking United Auto Workers in Flint, Michigan.
We arrived at the General Motors Metal Fabrication Plant to a crowd of energetic picketers from two UAW locals. The strike had begun just eleven days earlier over increasing job tasks and job safety issues. But as in many recent union fights, the larger issue of globalization has become central: how does a union fight for better conditions and higher wages when GM can move production to Central or South America or Asia, and produce more cheaply?
In Flint, welfare recipients, homeless and formerly homeless people, and supporters from the bus stood alongside UAW strikers in their fight for decent jobs at living wages. The coming together of the poor and unemployed !
on the New Freedom Bus with UAW workers dramatizes the powerful and necessary link between the employed and the unemployed.
After half an hour on the picket lines, talking with the strikers and waving to cars honking their support, freedom riders waved good-bye and boarded the bus to make it to Chicago before dark.
Early Sunday evening, the bus entered downtown Detroit and pulled into Central United Methodist Church, a church active in fights for!
social justice. We were welcomed by a crowd including Marian Kramer, co-president with Cheri of the National Welfare Rights Union. Local organizers fed us dinner and shuttled us to showers as we put up our tents in the parking lot. After breakfast the next morning, we gathered inside the church for a human rights tribunal organized by the Michigan Welfare Rights Union. 
After the tribunal we loaded the bus and drove to nearby Ypsilanti, where we had lunch and exchanged information about our struggles for economic human rights. We left Ypsilanti with the Genesse County welfare rights group to show the support of the New Freedom Bus for the striking United Auto Workers in Flint, Michigan.
In Flint, welfare recipients, homeless and formerly homeless people, and supporters from the bus stood alongside UAW strikers in their fight for decent jobs at living wages. The coming together of the poor and unemployed !
on the New Freedom Bus with UAW workers dramatizes the powerful and necessary link between the employed and the unemployed.