Sit-down Strike at Flint: Automobile Workers Organize a
New Union

In the gloomy evening of February 11, 1937, 400 tired,
unshaven, but very happy strikers marched out of the
sprawling automobile factory known as Fisher Body
Number 1. Most carried American flags and small bundles
of clothing. A makeshift banner on top of the plant
announced "Victory Is Ours." A wildly cheering parade line
of a thousand supporters greeted the strikers at the gates.
Shouting with joy, honking horns, and singing songs, the
celebrants marched to two other factories to greet other
emerging strikers. After forty -four days, the great Flint
sit-down strike was over.

Flint, Michigan, was the heart of production for General
Motors, the largest corporation in the world. In 1936 GM's
net profits had reached $285 million, and its total assets
were $1.5 billion. Originally a center for lumbering and then
carriage making, Flint had boomed with the auto industry
during the 1920s. Thousands of migrants streamed into the
city, attracted by assembly line jobs averaging about $30 a
week. By 1930 Flint's population had grown to about
150,000 people, 80 percent of whom depended upon work
at General Motors. A severe housing shortage made living
conditions difficult. Tar-paper shacks, tents, even railroad
cars were the only shelter available for many. Parts of the
city resembled a mining camp.

The Great Depression hit Flint very hard. Employment at
GM fell from a 1929 high of 56,000 to less than 17,000 in
1932. As late as 1938 close to half the city's families were
receiving some kind of emergency relief. By that time, as in
thousands of other American communities, Flint's private
and county relief agencies had been overwhelmed by the
needs of the unemployed and their families. Two new
national agencies based in Washington, D.C., the Federal
Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress
Administration, had replaced local sources of aid during the
economic crisis.

The United Automobile Workers (UAW) came to Flint in
1936 seeking to organize GM workers into one industrial
union. The previous year, Congress had passed the
National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner
Act), which facilitated union organizing by guaranteeing the
right of workers to join unions and bargain collectively. The
act established the National Labor Relations Board to
oversee union elections and prohibit illegal anti-union
activities by employers. But the obstacles to labor
organizing were still enormous. Unemployment was high,
and GM had maintained a vigorous anti-union policy for
years. By the fall of 1936, the UAW had signed up only a
thousand members. The key moment came with the seizure
of two Flint GM plants by a few hundred auto workers on
December 30, 1936. The idea was to stay in the factories
until strikers could achieve a collective bargaining agreement
with General Motors. "We don't aim to keep the plants or
try to run them," explained one sit-downer to a reporter,
"but we want to see that nobody takes our jobs. We don't
think we're breaking the law, or at least we don't think we're
doing anything really bad."

The sit-down strike was a new and daring tactic that gained
popularity among American industrial workers during the
1930s. In 1936 there were 48 sit-downs involving nearly
90,000 workers, and in 1937 some 400,000 workers
participated in 477 sit-down strikes. Sit-downs expressed the
militant exuberance of the rank and file. As one union song
of the day put it: When they tie the can to a union man, Sit
down! Sit down!

When they give him the sack they'll take him back, Sit
down! Sit down! When the speed up comes, just twiddle
your thumbs, Sit down! Sit down!

When the boss won't talk don't take a walk, Sit down! Sit
down! The strikers carefully organized themselves into what
one historian called "the sit down community." Each plant
elected a strike committee and appointed its own police
chief and sanitary engineer. Strikers were divided into
"families" of fifteen, each with a captain. No alcohol was
allowed, and strikers were careful not to destroy company
property. Committees were organized for every conceivable
purpose: food, recreation, sanitation, education, and contact
with the outside. Sit-downers formed glee clubs and small
orchestras to entertain themselves. Using loudspeakers, they
broadcast concerts and speeches to their supporters outside
the gates. A Women's Emergency Brigade--the strikers'
wives, mothers and daughters--provided crucial support
preparing food and maintaining militant picket lines. As the
sit-down strike continued through January, support in Flint
and around the nation grew. Overall production in the GM
empire dropped from 53,000 vehicles per week to 1,500.
Reporters and union supporters flocked to the plants. On
January 11, in the so-called Battle of Running Bulls, strikers
and their supporters clashed violently with Flint police and
private GM guards. Michigan governor Frank Murphy,
sympathetic to the strikers, brought in the National Guard to
protect them. He refused to enforce an injunction obtained
by GM to evict the strikers. In the face of determined unity
by the sit-downers, GM gave in and recognized the UAW as
the exclusive bargaining agent in all sixty of its factories. The
strike was perhaps the most important in American labor
history, sparking a huge growth in union membership in the
automobile and other mass-production industries. Rose
Pesotta, a textile union organizer, described the wild victory
celebration in Flint's overflowing Pengelly Building: "People
sang and joked and laughed and cried, deliriously joyful.
Victory meant a freedom they had never known before. No
longer would they be afraid to join unions." Out of the
tight-knit, temporary community of the sit-down strike
emerged a looser yet more permanent kind of community: a
powerful, nationwide trade union of automobile workers.
The UAW struggled successfully to win recognition and
collective bargaining rights from other carmakers, such as
Chrysler and Ford. The national UAW, like other new
unions in the mass-production industries, was composed of
locals around the country. The permanent community of
unionized auto workers won significant improvements in
wages, working conditions, and benefits. Locals also
became influential in the political and social lives of their
larger communities--industrial cities such as Flint, Detroit,
and Toledo. Nationally, organized labor became crucial
component of the New Deal political coalition and a key
power broker in the Democratic Party. The new reality of a
national community of organized labor would alter the
national political and economic landscape for decades to
come.