Flint sit-down: The specter of workers’ power

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

The specter of workers’ power haunted Wall Street in 1937. On Feb. 7 of that year, the New York Times lamented that in Flint, Mich., workers “actually seized physical possession of three large factories belonging to General Motors. They occupied and held those plants by force of arms, repelling efforts to evict them and starve them out. They ejected and barred company representatives and police. And set up executive councils that ran the plants.

“Once a sit-down strike has become a state of occupation,” the Times lamented, “there is little a company can do.”

Labor historians are nearly unanimous in recognizing the advantages of the sit-down over the conventional strike.

“The fear that his job would be taken by a strikebreaker or that production would somehow be maintained without him ... was removed when the employee sat by his idle machine inside the plant,” wrote Sidney Fine in the 1969 book “Sit Down.”

“As a picket outside the plant, moreover, the striker might be attacked by the police or even arrested and sent to jail. The employer, however, would hesitate to use force to dislodge strikers inside his plant because this cast him in the role of aggressor, because violence might damage his machinery, and because strikers were capable of putting up a more formidable defense inside the plant than on an exposed picket line. The strike on the inside thus offset the advantages which access to the forces of law and order normally gave the employer.”

Concurring, Foster Rhea Dulles wrote in 1949 in “Labor in America” that “[i]t was not an act of violence but of passive resistance, doubly effective in that such a strike could only be broken by forcible removal of the workers from company premises.”

Events in the tumultuous 1930s bear this out. During that period, scores of workers in the United States and other countries were killed on the picket line, including 18 massacred during the famous Little Steel strike in the same year as the Flint victory. Yet rarely were workers murdered during a sit-down, a notable exception being the killing of six and wounding of 22 strikers during the 1936 occupation of the Semperit rubber mill in Krakow, Poland.

Only in smaller enterprises did the bosses and the state attempt to evict strikers. After several brutal assaults in Detroit, the United Auto Workers held a March 23, 1937, rally of tens of thousands in Cadillac Square, threatening a general strike and a two for one: two sit-downs for every one attempt at evacuation. Sit-downers were left in peace after that.

The sit-down experience also had a profound and lasting impact on striker consciousness and morale.

In 1935 an Akron rubber worker wrote to the local newspaper about his dreary existence, concluding: “[W]e’ve nothing to look forward to. We’re factory hands.”

Covering the 1936 sit-downs, Louis Adamic described the transformation: “[S]itting by their machines, cauldrons, boilers and work benches they talked. Some realized for the first time how important they were in the process of rubber production...the situation is dramatic, thrilling.”

For example, when the rubber union president was beaten by company goons, “factory workers sat down in protest, forcing the company to close for a day. When work was resumed the next night a KKK fiery cross blazed up within view of the plant. This caused the workers to sit down again—and to dispatch a squad of ‘huskies’ to extinguish the cross.” (Jeremy Brecher, “Strike”)

Summing up in a 1995 interview, Genora Johnson—organizer of the Women’s Emergency Brigade—stated: “[T]he auto worker became a different human being. The women that had participated became a different type of woman.” (Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger, “Not Automatic.”)

The change in consciousness comes inevitably with changes, even temporary changes, in the relations of production. Not only did the workers stop production, they seized the means of production. Inside the plants—and stores, hospitals, mines, restaurants and even an Illinois prison—they created their own communities, their own workers’ democracies.

As Jim Pope writes in Law and History Review, “[I]n arenas ranging from the shop floor to the Supreme Court, worker activists seized every opportunity to promulgate rules, to interpret official law, and to enforce their rules and interpretations. They set production quotas, made rules governing the obligations of solidarity, and unilaterally established steward systems and grievance procedures. They formulated, justified, and implemented a putative legal right to stage sit-down strikes. They interpreted the Constitution to authorize the Wagner Labor Relations Act and enforced their interpretation through factory occupations.” (www.historycooperative.org)

In every case, strikers returned to work with a new-found sense of power.

On rare occasions an occupation went a step further, resuming production under workers’ control. In 1973, after the Lip watch factory in France announced it would close, workers held the plant for 68 days, producing watches without bosses and selling them at a 40 percent discount.

Almost 50 years after the Great Strike, Sam Marcy wrote in his book “High Tech, Low Pay” that an occupation “can change the form of the struggle, take it out of its narrow confines and impart to it a broader perspective. In truth, it brings to the surface a new working-class perspective on the struggle between the workers and the bosses. It says in so many words that we are not tied to a one-dimensional type of struggle with the bosses at a time when they have the levers of political authority in their hands.”

Marcy was observing the impact of high technology on the working class, anticipating its ravaging effects and looking for methods of struggle that would give exploited labor its greatest advantage.

Marcy would be overjoyed to learn of the victory, after just two days, of the recent sit-down at the Collins and Aikman auto-parts plant in Ontario. The company had reneged on giving severance checks to workers who were losing their jobs. One hundred members of the Canadian Auto Workers took over the plant; in less than 48 hours they won back their negotiated pay.

They are relearning the lessons articulated by a gum miner after a successful sit down: “Now we know our labor is more important than the money of the stockholders, than the gambling in Wall Street, than the doings of the managers and foremen.” (“Strike”)

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