In the fall of 1936, the fledgling United Automobile Workers (UAW) challenged the automakers' fierce anti-unionism. Several small unions had merged to establish the UAW as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor in October 1935, but the autoworkers were never comfortable within the AFL hierarchy. AFL president [William] Green's effort to select the UAW's leadership and dictate its organizing strategy provoked heated resistance, and by the summer of 1936 the autoworkers joined the new CIO.
Excited by the magnitude of FDR's reelection victory in November, the UAW immediately began planning a general organizing assault on the auto industry. The union decided to fight the first battle against General Motors, the nation's largest industrial employer, with more than a quarter-million workers, in 1936. . . .
Determined to avoid unionization at all costs, GM had spent close to $1 million between January 1934 and July 1936 to intimidate its workforce with what a U.S. Senate committee called "the most colossal super system of spies yet devised in any American corporation." "I have so many contacts" within the UAW's nucleus, one spy boasted, "that it would be impossible to organize the union; I know everything that is going on inside." This surveillance had devastated union efforts.
Throughout November and December 1936, as the UAW leaders formulated their plans, autoworkers jumped the gun: they began strikes in South Bend, Kansas City, Detroit, and Atlanta. Following the earlier example of Akron rubberworkers, these industrial actions by autoworkers took the form of "sit-down" strikes. Workers seized control of the plants where they worked, remaining inside rather than picketing outside, until management capitulated. This innovative tactic, which demonstrated the workers' willingness to violate owners' private-property rights to win their demands, prevented companies from replacing strikers with scabs. It also discouraged the use of violence against strikers, because deploying police, troops, or other armed groups against sit-downers risked destroying expensive company-owned buildings, machinery, and materials.
The UAW leadership, aware of the spreading auto "wildcats" (i.e., strikes called without official union sanction), decided to attack GM by striking the company's key Fisher Body plants in Cleveland and Flint. The strike was scheduled for right after New Year's Day, following the inauguration of New Dealer Frank Murphy as governor of Michigan.
But events raced ahead of the union leaders' plans. When workers in one department in the Cleveland Fisher Body plant sat down to protest wage cuts on December 28, the rest of the factory's 7,000 employees joined them. In Flint, an attempt by managers in Fisher Body Plant No. 2 to discipline three union members on December 30 led fifty workers to occupy that building. The next day, angry workers from Fisher No. 1 gathered at Flint's UAW hall, shouting at their leaders, "Shut her down! Shut the goddamn plant!" Streaming back into No. 1, between 500 and 1,000 workers took control of the factory in minutes, shutting down the assembly line.
The month-long sit-down strike in Flint that followed proved to be the pivotal labor struggle of the decade. If Flint autoworkers could beat General Motors -- the largest producer of automobiles, parts, and accessories in the world -- their victory would galvanize workers in auto and other basic industries. The Flint strike was emblematic of countless other labor battles between 1936 and 1942 because it revealed rank-and-filers' extraordinary creativity and bravery in the struggle for industrial unions.
Located sixty miles northwest of Detroit, Flint was a virtual company town. The mayor, police chief, and three city commissioners -- as well as Flint's newspaper, radio station, and school officials -- all were or had been on the General Motors payroll. General Motors' Chevrolet, Buick, Fisher Body, and AC Spark Plug plants employed four of every five workers in the city. . . .
Three grievances, typical of all auto plants, angered workers in all of GM's Flint plants: frequent and prolonged layoffs; arbitrary actions by management; and the killing speed of the work. Because of the industry's seasonal production cycle, employees worked long, hard hours in one period, only to be laid off for long stretches later the same year. "The fear of being laid off," one journalist noted, "hangs over the head of every worker. He does not know when the sword will fall."
Second, GM management was free to discipline, fire, lay off, and rehire at its own discretion, a power that foremen used to punish "troublemakers" and reward pets. "If he happened to like you," a Chevrolet employee explained, "or if you sucked around him and did him favors . . . you might be picked to work a few weeks longer than the next guy."
Speed-up was the workers' deepest grievance. The foremen "treated us like a bunch of coolies," a Flint Chevrolet employee later rememberd. "'Get it out. If you cannot get it out, there are people outside who will get it out.' That was their whole theme.". . . Autoworkers' powerlessness to change such oppressive conditions fueled an abiding anger toward the company.
This anger led a thousand workers to seize control of Fisher Body plant No. 1 on December 31, 1936, and for thousands of their fellow GM workers to follow suit in other plants in Flint and elsewhere. Their demands were extensive: a thirty-hour week, a six-hour day, and time-and-a-half pay for overtime so that work would be spread more widely; a minimum pay rate "commensurate with an American standard of living"; seniority based on length of employment (to limit management's arbitrary power) and reinstatement of "unjustly" fired employees; abolition of piecework; and establishment of joint control by management and the union over the speed of production in GM plants. To safeguard these and other gains from company and company-union tricks, the strikers demanded what the Wagner Act had only promised: recognition of the UAW as the "sole bargaining agency" for GM employees.
Seizing control of the plant and issuing a set of demands were only the first steps in winning the struggle with General Motors. The seized plants needed to be protected against company efforts to retake them, and the demands of the strikers had to be gotten out beyond the plant gates. To secure the plant from the inside and to supervise meals, sanitation, defense, education, and entertainment, a committee, which included representatives from each department in the plant, was formed.
Sit-downers lived up to a strict code of discipline. "We had guys patrol the plant, see that nobody got involved in anything they shouldn't," striker Bob Stinson recalled. "If anybody got careless with company property -- such as sitting on an automobile cushion without putting burlap over it -- he was talked to." Discipline was imposed by the workers themselves; each night, all those in the plant met to review the committee's decisions. . . .
General Motors depicted the strike as the work of a "small handful of workers" misled by "outside agitators" in the service of "a vast conspiracy to destroy all for which life is worth living." By occupying the plants, GM insisted, the UAW was "striking at the very heart of the right of the possession of private property," thereby endangering the property of every other company, businessman, and even homeowner in the land. GM found a judge to issue an injunction ordering strikers not only to leave the plants but also to refrain from picketing outside them. But when the CIO exposed the fact that the helpful judge owned over $200,000 worth of GM stock, this particular maneuver backfired.
Flint's large body of non-union autoworkers also played a key role. On the eve of the Flint sit-down, a local businessman with strong ties to General Motors had begun organizings a company union, the Flint Alliance. While the UAW repeatedly charged that GM workers were coerced into signing Flint Alliance membership cards, the truth is probably more complex: Flint had long been a company town dominated by a powerful, paternalistic employer to which many workers felt loyal. And the sit-down strikers were a minority; the majority of Flint autoworkers were waiting to see whether the UAW had a chance to win before committing themselves.
In any case, the Flint Alliances' charges that the sit-down strikers were depriving loyal workers of their right to continue working did influence public opinion. Gallup polls taken during the sit-down strike indicated that a majority of Americans believed that the strikers should leave the plant but that GM should not use force to evict them.
After GM's attempt to get a court injunction failed, the company turned to more drastic tactics. Company guards turned off the heat inside Chevrolet No. 2 plant (in 16-degree weather) and barred strike supporters from bringing in food. When sit-downers forced open the factory gates to allow the food in, GM called out the police. On January 11, sheriff's deputies and police, using tear gas, billy clubs, and guns, stormed the plant.
Strikers repelled the assault by turning on the plant's fire hoses and raining two-pound car hinges down on the police. Later that night the police returned. "We want peace!" shouted UAW leader Victor Reuther as the police charged again. "General Motors chose war! Give it to them!" The police were driven back a second time. Humiliated and angry, the cops opened fire, wounding several strikers. A third police charge, at midnight, also failed. Defeated, the police (known in the jargon of the day as "bulls") abandoned the field.
The "Battle of the Running Bulls" on January 11 galvanized GM workers dispirited by years of company intimidation. The next morning, Flint workers lined up two abreast at UAW headquarters to sign membership cards and pay dues. Ten thousand people gathered at the battle site, repeatedly singing "Solidarity Forever," the anthem first written by IWW balladeer Joe Hill.
Under pressure from GM officials, Michigan governor Frank Murphy ordered 1,500 National Guardsmen into Flint and tried to talk the unionists into leaving the plantswith the promise of negotiations. GM was unwilling to compromise, however. Company agents, police, and vigilantes beat UAW pickets and organizers not only in Flint but also in Detroit, Saginaw, and Anderson, Michigan, and in other auto plants where sit-down strikes inspired by events in Flint had spread. And though John L. Lewis [of the CIO and UMWA] called on President Roosevelt to help the workers, FDR remained silent. Roosevelt wanted a negotiated end to the strike and opposed using troops to evict the strikers, though he labeled the strikers' tactics 'wrong.'
After a month, the situation at Flint reached a stalemate. While employees slowly returned to work at most of Flint's GM operations, UAW activists remained in control of two Fisher Body plants in defiance of General Motors, the Flint police, Governor Murphy, and President Roosevelt. GM's repeated efforts to oust the sit-downers failed; unless Governor Murphy ordered the National Guard to seize the two Flint plants, the world's largest corporation could only wait.
The UAW devised a ruse to break the stalemate. Union leaders decided they could win the strike if they could stop production at Flint's Chevy plant No. 4, the sole source of engines for Chevrolet's entire car line. But a frontal assault was out of the question: GM's armed guards were simply too strong; they had to be decoyed. At a secret meeting, UAW officials informed company spies who had infiltrated the strike's leadership that the union planned to seize control of a different plant, Chevy No. 9. As the UAW hoped, GM shifted most of its guards to the decoy plant. When a small contingent of strikers entered Chevy No. 9 on February 1, GM guards went in after them. A fierce battle raged inside No. 9; police used tear gas, which Women's Emergency Brigade members helped dissipate by breaking the plant's windows with wooden clubs. Meanwhile, union stalwarts marched in Chevy No. 4 and took over the plant without violence as women patrolled the gates outside. Half of the 4,000 workers in No. 4 immediately joined the sit-down; the other half left the plant. By the GM officials realized what had happened, the UAW controlled the key factory in Flint.
GM finally caved in. With its car production at a near-standstill, its share of the automobile market plummeting, and its tactics in Flint frustrated at every turn, General Motors agreed on February 13 to negotiate. A week later, the company conceded defeat on the key issue of union recognition at its struck plants, acknowledging the UAW as bargaining agent for its members in those plants and agreeing not to organize company unions for six months. GM also agreed to drop all related lawsuits and to refrain from disciplining the strikers. All other UAW demands would be discussed in a national labor-management conference.
On paper, the battle remained unfinished, since most of the strike demands had yet to be won. In practice, however, the victory was enormous. Recognition by GM meant that UAW members could for the first time speak and act openly among their coworkers. "Even if we got not one damn thing out of it other than that," declared one GM employee in St. Louis, "we at least had a right to open our mouths without fear." More than this, GM's surrender boosted the spirit and self-confidence of the autoworkers and encouraged them to rely on militant, on-the-spot collective action to obtain and defend further gains.
And that is what they did. Within three weeks, GM was hit by eighteen sit-down strikes. . . . the sit-downs had taught the workers the power of organized, direct action. As a UAW member later recalled, "Every time a dispute came up the fellows would have a tendency to sit down and just stop working." Such tactics put teeth into thousands of local demands to raise pay, cease harassing union members, rein in tyrannical foremen, improve safety conditions, and decrease the speed of production. . . . Although often called with official UAW sanction and technically in violation of the GM contract, these sit-downs and other "quickie" strikes were, as UAW leader Roy Reuther later noted, "the greatest organizers."