June 2024

Greetings Brothers and Sisters. I hope this edition of the Lansing Labor News finds you all well. I am excited to share some news with all of you who enjoy reading our beloved paper. Over the past several months the Executive Board of the Lansing Labor News has been working with Michigan State University Libraries to digitize the entire history of the Lansing Labor News. This digitization project is not the chronological history of the Lansing Labor News but every single edition the paper has ever published.

I'm truly excited about the digitization of the Lansing Labor News because it means that the history of our paper will be preserved for future generations. This effort will allow easier access to the wealth of knowledge and history that the paper holds, and it's great to know that people will be able to explore and learn from the historical editions of the Lansing Labor News. It's a fantastic opportunity to celebrate and honor the legacy of our publication. But, as with any large endeavor, it will not be fast nor will it be easy. I thought it may be interesting to share with you just a bit of what has happened in this journey thus far. It all began last year with a proposed opportunity to have all of the work done by the Michigan State Library Digital Initiatives team. We then had to present the information to the entire Board of Directors here at the Labor News. In this proposal, we had to donate the seed money to give the project traction. I then worked with the Library team and we wrote letters to our Michigan Senators for grants to support this enormous project. Long story short, we have been able to secure enough funding to move the project forward! Make no mistake, capturing every page of the paper’s editions will take some serious time and money. In our history, we have published over 17,000 pages and counting. To put this into perspective, as far as taking paper to high-quality digital print; it takes roughly six minutes to digitize four pages of print.

Though this will take the library team a long time to accomplish digitizing the entire history, the exciting announcement is that we have been given confirmation that coming this fall, it is highly likely we will have some editions digitized and online. Though we don’t have any of the particulars, it gives me great pride to know that we will be giving our UAW family and the families of past UAW members the ability to go back in time and read the articles from their Local Union leadership dating as far back as they care to read and to understand the issues they were facing and felt worthy to write about. In short, I am proud to be a tiny part of bringing our storied history here in Lansing more closely to the public for their enjoyment.

As this project moves forward I will make sure to update everyone on the progress. I hope you all have a great summer and we will see you in the next edition of the Lansing Labor News.

In Solidarity,
Ben