United Auto Workers Strike Déjà Vu: Guest MINDSETTER™ Renehan
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Flint Michigan Sit Down Strike PHOTO: Sheldon Dick - Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
The legendary Flint, Michigan “Sit-Down” strike began on December 30, 1936, at GM’s Fisher Body Plant Number One, when a hundred or so of machinists simply stopped work, sat-down, and occupied the plant. The strike eventually spread to several other GM facilities throughout Flint and lasted until February 11, 1937, at which point an obstinate GM finally surrendered and acquiesced to most of Labor’s demands.
Between 1936 and 1937 GM had cut more than 9,000 Flint jobs while at the same time doing nothing to adjust production capacity or benchmarks, even increasing production significantly in 1936. At the same time, GM profits soared. Of the Big Three auto producers – Ford, Chrysler, and GM – only GM never once lost money during any fiscal year of the Great Depression. Despite this, in 1935 GM did away with its popular employee stock-investment plan, which had offered an attractive match for every dollar invested by workers. Such managerial adjustments as this, combined with layoffs, increased efficiency and profits but did so in a manner that adversely impacted the lives of many longtime employees, thus making unionization more a question of when than if.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIt goes without saying that GM management – led by such figures as Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Charles Kettering, and Charles Stewart Mott – took a dim view of the sit-down action. Although the strike had begun as a wildcat movement, representatives from the fledgling United Auto Workers Union, together with John Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, soon arrived to try to negotiate on behalf of the strikers. For many weeks, however, GM simply refused to negotiate at all, insisting that no talks would be had until the workers vacated GM’s private property.
“The industrial strike is still on,” C.S. Mott wrote on January 5. The strikes at Fisher Body had a ripple effect and soon forced the closure of many other GM plants, because, of course, cars simply could not be made without bodies. “This has thrown a good many thousand men out of work. Some production of parts is continuing but that will only last a short time and then those departments will shut down, so that I suppose there will be well over 20,000 [non-strikers] involuntarily thrown out of work.”
On January 11, with approximately 100 workers occupying the second floor of Fisher Body Plant Number Two, GM turned off the heat. That same day, for the first time, police at the gate refused the delivery of dinner for the strikers. Later that evening, men from inside the building stormed through the locked gates and briefly burst into the street, joining more than a thousand supportive picketers, before retreating back into the plant and relocking the gate behind them. This led to the riot which would henceforth be referred to as “The Battle of the Running Bulls.” Up to 45 police officers fired tear-gas into the plant and also at picketers, who in turn threw stones at the officers. When dawn finally broke, the street in front of the plant was, according to one journalist, “littered with broken glass, bottles, [and] rocks … ”
To this day, it remains a point of debate whether GM instigated the riot or the Flint police acted alone. Nevertheless, the national press was quick to blame GM for the violence. Within a week, GM – at this point, postriot, far more concerned about public relations than employee relations – was at the bargaining table, with the venerable John Lewis taking the lead in negotiating with the corporation. Lewis proved an agile negotiator and did much to gain significant advances in pay and work rules.
Some of the grandchildren of those first GM strikers are on strike again today. The tension between capital and labor is as organic as it is eternal. Collective bargaining, no matter how bitter it might at times become, remains the one lubricant capable of assuring that the inherent friction between these two forces results ultimately in balance, fairness, and profits for all.
Edward Renehan's latest book is THE LIFE OF CHARLES STEWART MOTT: INDUSTRIALIST, PHILANTHROPIST, MR. Flint, published by the University of Michigan Press. He lives in Wickford.
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