‘Incredible joy’
Sharing her love of labor with youngsters is a ‘blast,’ says one-time journeyman
Alecia Lewis squeezed in as much time as she could with her students at the UAW’s Summer Scholarship Program at Black Lake.
“I had a blast watching the young people get excited about what they were learning,” she said. “They have astounding interest.”
Sharing her love of labor with an enthusiastic audience was as much fun for Lewis as for the students. The 8- to 11-year-olds focused on topics such as collective bargaining, child labor, teamwork and even a labor scavenger hunt.
A longtime member of UAW Local 167 in Grand Rapids, Mich., Lewis spent the summer as new coordinator of preteen activities at the Walter and May Reuther UAW Family Education Center.
“I’m proud to have Alecia as part of our teaching team. When our
teachers represent the diversity of our members, our children benefit from a
unique social and academic experience,” said Carly Murdy, director of the
UAW Education Department.
Lewis joined the UAW in 1973 at age 22 when she took a job at Diesel Equipment (then a General Motors facility) to help pay for community college. She enjoyed the work and stayed, progressing from skilled-trades apprentice to journeyman cutter-grinder.
“They were taking union dues out of my pay and gave me a union contract. I figured that if this was something that I was paying for, I needed to find out more about it,” said Lewis, who also wrote for her local’s newspaper. “I started going to union meetings, participated in standing committees and started getting an understanding. It made all the difference in the world.”
Thirty-two years later Lewis is an internal auditor at the same plant, which is now Delphi’s Grand Rapids facility, where she ensures compliance with manufacturing operations.
In addition to teaching at Black Lake, Lewis has earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, gotten a real estate license, received a graduate certificate in counseling, done fund raising for the Kent County United Way and substitute taught for Grand Rapids Public Schools.
Most of that time she was a single parent raising two children. “I am not a person who has ever been able to sit still. I have to keep going. I have to find something to do. I have to thank the Lord that I have been able to do so much,” said Lewis, giving additional credit to her parents and husband, Jerome Lewis, whom she married last December.
For now, Lewis said, everything else takes a back seat to her students whose “genuine interest and keen sense of union has been an incredible joy.”
