A Promise Kept
Toledo monument pays tribute to workers
When she was 10, Sena Mourad stood in line at UAW Local 12 with her father to collect his SUB pay.
Her dad, Ahmad Mourad, retired last year after 28 years at the Toledo Jeep plant. Before that, the Lebanese immigrant earned $1.25 an hour stocking shelves at a department store.
“When my dad became a UAW member, we were blessed with better wages, health insurance — you name it,” said Sena, now 39, the oldest of five children. “I promised him that someday I’d do something for the union.”
Once she started it took five years, lots of determination and $250,000, but Sena Mourad kept her promise, creating a monument to striking workers at the former Electric Auto-Lite Co. who fought one of the earliest battles of autoworkers for the right to organize.
Pivotal strike
In 1934, two years before the Flint sitdown strike, Auto-Lite workers at the spark plug factory near Elm and Champlain streets in north Toledo walked off their jobs over low wages and poor working conditions during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
They were replaced with scabs but continued their protests, huddled over fires burning in drums outside the plant.
The governor called in the National Guard, who attacked them with tear gas and bullets, killing two innocent bystanders and injuring 200.
The Auto-Lite strike is credited with getting Congress to pass the 1935 Wagner Act, which gave workers the legal right to collective bargaining and prohibited employers from interfering with labor organizing.
“Auto-Lite was a pivotal strike,” said UAW Region 2B Director Lloyd Mahaffey. “The GM workers in Flint were empowered largely because of what happened here in Toledo.”
Consider it done
For her efforts to build the memorial, in 2001 Mourad received a Walter P. Reuther Distinguished Service Award.
Surprisingly, Mourad isn’t a UAW member, or a member of any union — a first for any Reuther Award winner in Region 2B.
The seed was planted in 1996 when Pete Gerken, a Local 12 member and Toledo city councilman, asked Mourad, who volunteers at the local, to take on the project. “Consider it done,” said Mourad, an advertising sales rep at a Toledo television station who has a 19-year-old son.
Federally funded with the help of Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, the project also received financial support from Region 2B, Local 12, other unions and the Toledo Arts Commission.
“Young people today often say, ‘We don’t need a union.’ But I say, let me tell you what happened here. … If we didn’t have these brave soldiers who came before us, where would we be now?” Mourad said.
If you go
Union Memorial Park is located at Elm and Champlain streets in north Toledo. For directions, call UAW Local 12 at 419-241-9126.
