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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 13, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Flint sit-down strike showed workers' power

By Shannon Spence, Journeywoman Electrician, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers

Feb. 11 is the 60^th anniversary of the victory in the sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich. This historic struggle decisively broke the back of the open shop in the U.S. auto industry, launching the meteoric rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and bringing millions of industrial workers into labor unions.

It is a glorious chapter in the proud history of the working class. And it bears re-examination today-especially in light of current developments in the war between bosses and workers.

In the early 1930s, during the first years of the Roosevelt administration, laws were passed that for the first time guaranteed workers' right to bargain collectively and to strike. New laws also set rules on maximum hours of work and minimum wages.

These laws were part of the New Deal package of reforms that also included Social Security, welfare and unemployment insurance. These reforms came in response to mass working-class protests of the Great Depression's effects on workers, especially the poor and unemployed.

Today, as politicians of both bourgeois parties move to dismantle the package of workers' rights won over 60 years ago, the lessons of the Flint sit-down strike are especially relevant. Flint showed not only that workers could fight and win-but that such victories could be won by groups of workers the bosses believed could never organize.

As today's anti-working-class attacks continue, as living standards decline, as welfare programs end and recipients are moved into forced labor, as immigrants' rights are under attack, as retirees' benefits are offered to Wall Street- the 60^th anniversary of Flint is a timely reminder of the power of the workers.

AFL stood still

By 1936, after much of the new labor legislation had been put in place, workers were flocking into unions by the hundreds of thousands. Strike after strike was waged to win union recognition.

The bosses' response to the new situation was to spend millions of dollars on anti-union campaigns that took the form of propaganda, spies, armed goons, tear gas, armored cars, fragmentation bombs, and sub-machine guns.

This anti-union effort had some initial successes. By 1935 union locals began disbanding. Wages were again falling and working hours rising.

In the face of this capitalist assault the American Federation of Labor did nothing. The AFL steadfastly refused to organize the 35,000,000 industrial workers who were clamoring for union protection, sticking instead to its long-time emphasis on organizing only skilled workers by craft.

It was under these conditions that the Congress of Industrial Organizations was born, first as a committee inside the AFL in November of 1935.

The workers were more than ready. Before the CIO could even open offices, a torrent of strikes rolled across the land.

Increasingly, bold new tactics came into play. In several places, workers even took over factories. The first such occupation came at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minn., in 1935.

But the decisive battle was to be the great Flint sit-down strike at General Motors.

Women saved the strike

In 1936 the General Motors Corp. seemed invincible. It employed over half of all U.S. auto workers, with plants in 57 cities and towns across the country.

Conditions at these plants were horrendous. A brutal piece-work system guaranteed increasing speed-ups and decreasing wages.

Nowhere was this truer than in Flint, the heart of the General Motors empire. Flint was a classic company town-GM not only owned the plants but controlled the courts, the police and the entire city officialdom.

On Nov. 18, 1936, the workers at the GM plant in Atlanta sat down. They struggled on, alone, for 27 days. Then, in early December, work at the Kansas City plant stopped too.

Then Cleveland shut down. Then Flint.

When all was said and done, 140,000 of GM's 150,000 production workers would stop work in the strike wave. Over 18 GM plants would sit idle.

The workers were demanding union recognition and a national auto contract. The struggle quickly centered on Flint.

Inside three huge plants, workers had seized the machinery of production, shut it down, and announced they would stay put until they won their demands.

Outside, masses of people picketed day and night, surrounding the plant and protecting the sit-down strikers. Carloads of workers from all over the Midwest-Toledo, Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, Chicago and elsewhere-came to Flint to walk the lines and defend the strike.

Women played a key role safeguarding the strike. They not only provided food that they passed up to the strikers through the plant windows.

No, the women played more than their expected role. They organized and maintained the picket lines in the bitter cold-and met police intimidation with baseball bats and other home-made weapons to physically prevent the enemy from getting inside.

GM did try once to recapture the plants by force. Police ended up on the receiving end of fire hoses they had meant to drive back the workers with.

So the company tried to freeze the strikers out, and to starve them out. Each tactic failed.

Facing death

By February 1937, after more than a month of sitting in at the sprawling complexes-with the huge machines quiet and the mass pickets outside day and night holding the police and company vigilantes at bay-the tension was unbearable. The GM bosses and the entire bourgeois class were howling for the governor to clear the plants by force.

Negotiations were at an impasse. The National Guard had two of the three plants surrounded.

The workers knew it was very likely that the struggle would end with the spilling of their blood. Yet in the face of this certainty they stood their ground.

The strikers wrote to Gov. Frank Murphy: "We have decided to stay in the plant. ¬ We fully expect that if a violent effort is made to oust us, many of us will be killed. ¬ If this result follows from the attempt to eject us, you are the one who must be held responsible for our deaths!"

In the face of the workers' unwavering courage, it was the bosses who gave in. After 44 days, GM finally broke.

On Feb. 11, 1937, the workers emerged victorious.

They had won a union contract. Within a year, wages had been increased by $3 million and the United Auto Workers had grown by 475,000 members.

Ford and Chrysler followed, grudgingly. By 1941 the Big Three auto makers were all union.

The victorious Flint sit-down strike broke the back of the open shop. Sit-down strikes swept the country. Sections of the steel industry were finally organized.

Tens of thousands of African American workers, who had fought for admission into the labor movement since 1869, were organized. So were thousands of working women.

From 1936 to 1940, the number of organized workers in the United States almost tripled. As one result, the eight-hour day-for which workers had fought and died since 1866--at last became reality in much of industry.

Today's new workers

By the time of the Flint sit-down strike 60 years ago, technological innovations in production had changed the nature of both work and the working class. Early in the century, when Henry Ford had introduced the assembly line, the owners hoped it meant the end of union organizing.

Work was divided into fractured tasks performed over and over again. Anyone could perform the work, which was numbing and repetitive. This seemed to strip the workers of the status of skilled tradespeople and to isolate them from each other.

And in fact, the old guard of the labor movement in the AFL was unable to analyze these developments, unwilling to embrace the new situation, and unprepared to see the promise and opportunity for organizing the workers in this new arena of labor.

However, the working class pushed the struggle beyond the nominal leaders, starkly showing that the essence of the struggle between labor and capital always remains the same. New conditions provide new potential, new avenues for the class struggle.

Today the mass of industrial workers is giving way to service workers, part-time and contract workers. Welfare recipients, mostly women, are being forcibly made into workfare workers. Immigrants are super-exploited for sub-minimum wages. The ruling class seems confident that none of them can be organized.

They're wrong. New tactics will emerge as the new workers find ways to fight for their rights. That's one of the lasting lessons of the Flint sit-down strike.

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