The Flint Sit-down Strike
The 44-day Flint Sit-down Strike that ended Feb. 11, 1937, with a first UAW contract with General Motors was the most pivotal strike in early UAW history. It established the UAW as the sole bargaining representative for workers at the world’s largest corporation and set the stage for organizing industrial workers across the United States.
In mid-November 1936, workers at Bendix in South Bend, Ind., established the sit-down strike, though illegal, as a tactic where workers occupied the workplace. Two days before the Flint sit-down, workers at the Cleveland Fisher plant had sat down. Union members there had declared “No settlement without a national agreement.”
The decisive battle started Dec. 30, 1936, in Flint, Mich.
In 1936, union organizing was growing, but it was still a struggle. Corporations fought unionization with firings and fists, and violated the Wagner Act, which prohibited anti-union activities by employers, at will. Spies pretended to be militant unionists but reported on union activities back to the company. Assembly line speedups were common and wages were barely livable for the 50,000 GM employees at several plants in Flint.
“They wanted a full day’s work for a half-day’s pay. Before we had the union, I was working 12 hours per day for 57 cents per hour, straight time,” said retired sit-downer Lawrence Placer, 87. “We didn't have any benefits. The only benefits we had was to work yourself to death.”
Placer worked at Fisher Body Plant 1 where 3,000 workers struck when they found GM was about to transport stamping dies out of the plant. Removing dies was a signal that the company was taking jobs elsewhere. Across town that same day, 100 workers sat down at the smaller Plant 2 after two inspectors were fired for wearing union buttons.
Workers at numerous GM plants were affected by the Flint actions. Sit-downs sprang out at plants in Anderson, Ind., and Norwood, Ohio. Other plants that fed parts to Flint were closed. Some workers were locked out to prevent sit-downs. Supporters streamed into Flint from across the Midwest to man picket lines and other support activities.
Women workers were sent out when the sit-down started but were integral in their actions as picketers, cooks and members of the Women’s Emergency Brigade that was dispatched for union support at hot spots. At times, these women used themselves as human shields between police and strikers.
GM ran Flint, and the company had union families threatened with eviction, credit denied at stores, wives pressured into writing letters claiming they were ill to their husbands in the plants, and more.
