The Flint sit-down strike: One battle in a larger class war

1937 FLINT SIT-DOWN LABOR HISTORY SERIES
PARTS: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The Great Sit-Down Strike, in which auto workers in Flint, Mich., occupied General Motors plants for 44 days, is rich with anecdotes that make for great storytelling. An historian, however, cannot simply tell stories, but must place those stories in a historical context. While the sit-down itself was extraordinary, it was one episode of a larger class war.

The upsurge of the 1930s included workers of every race and nationality. They were young and old, women and men, immigrant and born here. An early battle was the 1933 strike in St. Louis of 1,400 nut shellers, who were primarily African-American women demanding pay equity and a reversal of recent pay cuts—demands they won. Mexican textile workers organized in San Antonio and Los Angeles; farm workers organized the Filipino Labor Union and the Confederation of Farmers and Workers (CCO for its initials in Spanish). Black and white sharecroppers formed the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. In 1934, some 400,000 textile workers struck from Maine to Alabama, but the strike was brutally crushed.

In 1935 union membership had suffered a dramatic decline, a response to state repression and betrayals by the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Dominated by white, male, skilled workers born in the U.S., the AFL had ignored pleas by the NAACP to fight racist discrimination. In contrast, in 1936-37 the multinational Congress of Industrial Organizations grew to nearly three million members.

The huge wave of copycat sit-downs following the Flint showdown involved at least half a million workers from all walks of life. Some 477 sit-downs are recorded for 1937, a tenfold increase over 1936, and there were many unrecorded “quickies.” There were many more in auto, including a 31-day sit-down at Chrysler, but the largest number, 80, was in the multinational and female-dominated textile industry. Workers in hospitals, restaurants, department stores, cigar factories and bakeries, and even prisoner-workers sat down. “Sitting down,” a Detroit News reporter remarked, “has replaced baseball as the national pastime.”

Over 4,700 strikes occurred that year. Many labor leaders also worked with and helped form civil rights organizations of the oppressed, including the National Negro Congress, Committee for the Protection of Filipino Rights, American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, and El Congreso de los Pueblos de Habla Español (Congress of Spanish-speaking People).

Fearing for its very existence, Capital lashed out on all fronts, including the ideological front. KKK propaganda cried out that the “CIO wants whites and blacks on the same level” while the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion denounced unions as a communist plot.

Masquerading as labor’s champion, the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin formed the National Union for Social Justice. He made scathing speeches against capitalism, but foamed at the mouth with hatred of Jews and communism. An early Roosevelt supporter, he later denounced the president as a tool of both Jewish bankers and the Soviet Union.

While people of color were not the principal target of his speeches, Coughlin supported the presidential campaign of the racist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, blaming his murder on “the New York Jew machine.” He voiced solidarity with Hitler and Mussolini, eventually giving speeches that were word for word translations of the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

Despite the priest’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, the super-rich auto plant owner Henry Ford funded Coughlin’s reprinting of the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of Zion.”

A minority faction in the UAW—the faction that opposed the CIO and favored the AFL—built a relationship with the Michigan cleric (now called “the father of hate radio”). After he eventually denounced sit-down strikes, it was hard for Coughlin to maintain influence among autoworkers.

Fortunately, the UAW leaders refused to be swayed by bigotry and built a multinational union that by the end of the decade counted almost 650,000 members, and the CIO broke with the racism and the elitism of the AFL. Otherwise, history might have recorded the 1930s as a decade not of triumph for the working class but of a precipitous decline in union membership.

These lessons are so important now, when rightist Pat Buchanan speaks against “free trade,” or anti-immigrant TV personality Lou Dobbs denounces union-busters like Wal-Mart and Delphi. These modern-day versions of Coughlin pose as saviors of the working class, but their real agenda is to divide the exploited class of workers by promoting racism and immigrant-bashing.

If anything, they are even more dangerous now because of the changed character of the working class. Since the high tech-based restructuring of the 1980s, oppressed workers from imperialism’s internal and external colonies have swelled the ranks of labor. They have imported a militancy not seen in decades, a militancy that culminated in May Day 2006.

Racist demagogues will not build a movement to save 100,000 jobs in auto from destruction. Only a class-wide movement—one that is pro-immigrant, pro-woman and pro-lesbian/gay/bi/trans rights, one that is internationalist and anti-racist to the core—can stop union-busting and save workers’ livelihoods from the chopping block of corporate restructuring.

1937 FLINT SIT-DOWN LABOR HISTORY SERIES
PARTS: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10