The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 buoyed the hopes of American workers. For the first time, the federal government officially encouraged the process of unionism and collective bargaining. By mid 1936, however, this optimism faded, as workers found themselves still vehemently fighting anti-union employers who refused to recognize the Act's constitutionality. In response, many workers adopted more aggressive and creative tactics to force their employers to the bargaining table. This new shop-floor militancy and ingenuity is best illustrated by the sit-down strike wave of 1936 to 1937, during which nearly 500,000 workers struck, not by erecting picket lines, but by laying down their tools and refusing to leave their employer's property.
The first wide-scale use of the sit-down strike occurred in January 1936 at Firestone's Akron, Ohio, tire plant. Worker-management relations in Akron had deteriorated through late 1935 and early 1936. The main points of contention concerned the lowering of piece rates, the length of the workday, and management's continued harassment of union members and activists. This frustration with management was further exacerbated by what many workers viewed as the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) conservative approach to labor relations. Tensions finally boiled over and in January 1936 a small group of militant workers peacefully occupied Firestone's main tire plant and brought production to a standstill.
The sit-down strike had many advantages over the traditional picket line. First, because workers physically held possession of company property, management was unlikely to do anything that might harm the expensive machinery. Second, occupying the factory made it much more difficult for the company to bring in replacement workers. Finally, and most importantly, this tactic permitted a militant minority of workers to force employers to the bargaining table. To succeed, strikers only needed enough workers to retain control of the plant. The success of a traditional strike, however, depended on near total participation. Though the Akron strike did not end with the signing of a formal contract, the workers did compel Firestone to bargain with their chosen representatives. Furthermore, the strike illuminated a growing militancy among American workers who were unwilling to wait for the government or the traditional labor movement to come to their rescue.
Though the Akron rubber workers were among the first to successfully employ the sit-down strike, this tactic is most famously associated with the United Automobile Workers (UAW) efforts to organize General Motors (GM) during the winter of 1936 to 1937. Although autoworkers were relatively well paid, there was growing discontent over frequent seasonal layoffs, the speed-up of the assembly line, and the near dictatorial powers of foreman to hire, fire, and discriminate against union supporters. These grievances led to a series of strikes, conducted without official union approval, during the summer and early fall of 1936. Relations took a turn for the worse in December 1936, when GM turned down the request of Homer Martin, president of the UAW, to discuss worker grievances. In response, workers seized control of GM's Fisher Body plant in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 28. Two days later workers at the company's Fisher Body No. 1 and No. 2 plants in Flint, Michigan, also sat down on the job and brought production to a complete halt. Within a few days, this core group of workers managed to idle nearly 120,000 of GM's 150,000 workers.
General Motors reacted by securing a court injunction requiring the sit-down strikers to vacate the company's plants. Confident the company would not rush the plant, the workers ignored the court order. The workers' hopes were further buoyed by the landslide reelection of President Franklin Roosevelt in November 1936. The same polling day witnessed the election of several prolabor governors, including Frank Murphy of Michigan. While in the past employers could usually expect the governor or president to enforce judicial rulings against workers, the elections of 1936 temporarily altered the political balance of power. Governor Murphy refused to enforce the injunction, and instead of using troops to break up the strike, he deployed them to protect the workers from local authorities who sided with GM.
Realizing that neither Roosevelt nor Murphy would enforce the injunctions, and watching its competitors gain in market share, GM management finally decided to enter into negotiations in early February. The two sides signed a formal agreement on February 11, 1936. Though the agreement did not result in a complete victory for the workers in that the UAW did not achieve exclusive representation rights, it nevertheless did compel GM to recognize the UAW as the bargaining representative for its members. Most importantly, though, the workers had successfully defeated the nation's largest employer and illuminated the power of the sit-down strike.
The impact of the Flint sit-down strike reverberated well beyond the auto industry. Workers inspired by the Flint strikers flocked to the labor movement, especially the new industrial unions associated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The most important post-Flint victory occurred on March 12, 1937, when, without a strike, U.S. Steel signed an agreement with John Lewis recognizing the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee as the bargaining representative for its members. Thus, by the spring of 1937, two of the nation's largest, most anti-union corporations were organized. The sit-down strike, however, quickly disappeared as a primary weapon in labor's arsenal. Workers first abandoned the tactic because of growing public resentment over what was deemed to be the lawless nature of the labor movement and its lack of respect for property rights. Political support for these actions also ebbed as public resentment began to rise. Furthermore sit down strikes became less necessary when the Supreme Court upheld, in April 1937, the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act. Now workers had a legal means for achieving unionization and no longer needed to occupy their employer's property—which, in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp (1939), the Supreme Court ruled constituted an illegal occupation of private property.
See Also:AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); ORGANIZED LABOR; STRIKES; STEEL WORKERS' ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (SWOC); UNITED AUTOMOBILE WORKERS (UAW).
BIBLIOGRAPHYDubofsky, Melvyn. The State and Labor in Modern America. 1994.
Gray, Lorraine W. With Babies and Banners. Story of theWomen's Emergency Brigade. New Day Films. 1978.
Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed. Who Built America: WorkingPeople and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 2: From the Gilded Age to the Present, 2nd edition. 2000.
Zieger, Robert H. American Workers, American Unions:The Twentieth Century. 1994.
Zieger, Robert H. The CIO: 1935–1955. 1995.
Douglas J. Feeney
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4