What’s going on in this country? Unions stand against those trends. We’ve got to somehow insulate the robust American economy from this global economy that seems to want to devour our standard of living.

—JAMES P. HOFFA, TEAMSTERS PRESIDENT

No generation has ever had the opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that leaves no one behind. It is a wonderful opportunity.

—FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON

I’ve made this argument before, I’ll make it again. We are part of a global economy. We’re not reversing that.

—FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

This is a major day in Michigan’s history. Again, I don’t view this as anti-union at all. I believe it is pro-worker.

—GOVERNOR RICK SNYDER

The American dream was dying. It was dying not only in Williston and the small towns from which the men there fled, but in the very place it was created.

It was a cold afternoon when thousands of union members were chanting on the capitol grounds as the outgoing Republican-led legislature voted to make Michigan the twenty-fourth right-to-work state in America. That meant a person who worked in a union shop was not required to pay union dues but would still receive any benefits the union negotiated for its members. It was death for organized labor, which had been dying for years anyway. Even union members don’t like paying dues. So who in his right mind would pay for something he could get for free?

The same thing was going on in Wisconsin with the public-sector employees. And like in Wisconsin, the governor of Michigan thought his coup de grâce against collective bargaining (pro-worker and freedom of choice was his preferred Orwellian phraseology) might be parlayed into a bid for the White House.

It was shocking, to Michigan union members at least, considering that the United Auto Workers was celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its birth in Flint, just down the road.

It didn’t take a fucking hundred years, one beefy protester lamented to me on the statehouse steps. His placard read “Union Til I Die.”

I told him I hoped he still had his health care because death was coming sooner rather than later. He didn’t laugh.

You think that’s funny? he hissed. This is the North, motherfucker. This is Michigan, and they’re turning us into fucking Mississippi.

Mississippi. He was close, but it wasn’t exactly Mississippi.