Sprawled on the banks of the Rouge river in Dearborn, Michigan, “the Rouge,” as the workers called it, was unique in both size and complexity. UAW Local 600, based at the Rouge, was the world's largest local union; it was also one of the most militant, radical, and egalitarian unions in America – and one of the most democratic. The local's “lived democracy” of self-governing workers incarnated, in its own way, some of the same underlying patterns already revealed in our analysis of the insurgent origins and radical sustenance of democracy in the CIO's international unions.

The Rouge was the single largest, fully integrated industrial unit on earth. It combined and integrated every basic operation involved in the production of an automobile. Trains hauled raw materials and equipment over the plant's twenty-four miles of railroad tracks, and ships laden with ore and fuel directly discharged their cargoes into huge concrete storage bins with a capacity of two million tons, to be processed and transformed into finished products. Its foundry and 500,000 h.p. electric powerhouse were the biggest in existence. The new cars that rolled off the Rouge's massive assembly line were produced “from the ground up”: All of the major phases of the production process involved in the manufacture of an automobile, from blast furnace to assembly line, were carried out by workers in some twenty-one different “building units” and subunits.