In mid-July, on a hot Detroit afternoon, I came to Solidarity House—the national headquarters of the United Automobile Workers Union—to have a talk with Owen Bieber, the union’s new president. The result follows below.

In a 1961 filni illustrating how the UAW was training a new generation of leaders, Brendan Sexton, the union’s educational director, and Guy Nunn, its TV and radio commentator, chose to focus on the experiences of a typica...