SYMHC Classics: Flint Sit-down Strike

This late 2021 episode covers a strike in Flint, Michigan, which was at the heart of auto manufacturing for General Motors in 1936. And while the strike was largely centered around Flint, it also involved workers at GM factories all over the U.S.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have an upcoming episode about organized
labor in the nineteen forties in the US, and it's
got some connections to the National Labor Relations Act of
nineteen thirty five, also known as the Wagner Act. We
talked about the Wagner Act and how it related to workers'
rights to unionize and strike in our episode on the

(00:23):
Flint sit Down Strike, so we are replaying that episode
as Today's Saturday Classic. This one originally came out on
December sixth, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and

(00:48):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. The eighty fifth anniversary of the Flint sit
Down Strike is this month. That's marked as starting on
December thirtieth of nineteen thirty six, but that name and
date don't quite capture the whole of the strike. Flint,
Michigan was absolutely at the heart of auto manufacturing for

(01:12):
General Motors, and the strike was largely centered around Flint,
but this strike also involved workers at GM factories all
over the United States, and while the major strike activity
in Flint started on December thirtieth. It also followed earlier
strikes in other parts of Michigan and in other states.
So this name and date, as they're commonly known, it's

(01:35):
really a little bit broader than that. We have talked
about several strikes on the show before, including strikes in
the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland. But this one
in particular has been cited as one of the most
significant and influential strikes in United States labor history, and
this strike took place while the world was still trying

(01:55):
to recover from the Great Depression. This economic catastrophe had,
of course been devastating to people all over the globe.
General Motors in particular had cut nearly half of its
staff while also increasing requirements for workers productivity and implementing
seasonal layoffs. Although the company would loan money to laid
off workers, they had to pay it back out of

(02:18):
their wages once they were back on the job. But
even people who had steady work at GM during the
Great Depression didn't really have a sense of job security.
There were so many people who were out of work
and just desperate for jobs that the company knew it
could fire anyone for essentially any reason, and have a
replacement waiting immediately. It was especially true in places like Flint,

(02:43):
where GM was by far the biggest employer. The US
government took various steps to try to bolster the nation's
economy during the depression. One was the National Industrial Recovery
Act of nineteen thirty three. This was part of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and he signed it into
law during his first one hundred days in office. This

(03:04):
was an act quote to encourage national Industrial recovery, to
foster fair competition, to provide for the construction of certain
useful public works, and for other purposes. The National Industrial
Recovery Act suspended a lot of the antitrust legislation that
we talked about recently in our episodes on Ida Tarbell. Instead,

(03:26):
this Act encouraged businesses to form alliances and to establish
codes of fair competition. These codes were meant to apply
across whole industries, setting standards for things like consumer protections,
fair wages, and prices for goods. The idea was that
these codes would reduce unfair business practices that were making

(03:48):
it harder for struggling businesses to stay afloat during the crisis,
so things like undercutting competitors' prices to the point that
they just could not go that low. Section se an
A of the Act read quote, Every code of fair competition, agreement,
and license, approved, prescribed, or issued under this Title shall

(04:08):
contain the following conditions. One that employees shall have the
right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their
own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint,
or coercion of employers of labor or their agents in
the designation of such representatives or in self organization or
in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining

(04:30):
or other mutual aid or protection. Two that no employee
and no one seeking employment, shall be required, as a
condition of employment, to join any company union, or to
refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of
his own choosing. And three that employers shall comply with
the maximum hours of labor, minimum rates of pay, and

(04:53):
other conditions of employment approved or prescribed by the President.
This Act contain lots of provisions that we haven't gotten
into here, including authorizing the President to establish a federal
emergency Administration of public works. But in terms of the
Flint sit down strike, Section seven A was key. It

(05:15):
protected employee's right to organize and bargain collectively, and this
was a huge deal. Although the term collective bargaining had
been coined by British social reformer Beatrice web in eighteen
ninety one, workers had been trying to work together to
secure better pay in working conditions for centuries, and in
the US, trade unions and other efforts to collectively bargain

(05:38):
had been illegal. They were treated as criminal conspiracies. The
National Industrial Recovery Act was the first federal law legalizing
union membership and collective bargaining, but in general employers were
reluctant to comply with various provisions of the Act. There
were also questions about whether the Supreme Court would find

(05:59):
it to be unconstitutional. Some employers used this uncertainty to
justify their non compliance with the law, and they kept
working directly against their employees' legal right to unionize. As
a result, labor disputes, including strikes, surged as workers and
their unions fought for the kinds of rights and protections

(06:20):
they were legally entitled to, and some of these disputes
led to violence. In August of nineteen thirty three, Roosevelt
established the National Labor Board, chaired by Senator Robert F.
Wagner of New York, to try to mediate between the
growing labor movement and industry leaders. In addition to Wagner,
the Board had six members, three each representing labor and industry.

(06:43):
But the board really didn't have much enforcement power. Companies
that were operating under one of the codes that had
been established under the new law were allowed to display
an emblem of a blue eagle, and all that the
NLB could really do when companies stopped following the rules
was to make them take their eagle down. In May

(07:04):
of nineteen thirty five, the Supreme Court issued its decision
in Scheckter Poultry Corps versus United States, which did indeed
find the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional. At
the same time, though the act's industrial provisions were supposed
to expire after two years or sooner if the President
or Congress decided they were no longer needed, this decision

(07:27):
came just a few weeks before that expiration date. A
big reason behind that decision was that this act delegated
a lot of legislative power to the president without really
setting guidelines on how the president could use that power.
That was not the whole decision, obviously, but that's sort
of the crux. People were divided as to whether or

(07:50):
to what extent this Act had been effective at what
it set out to do. It was supposed to quote,
remove obstructions to the free flow of interstate and foreign commerce.
It was supposed to do that by reducing labor disputes,
reducing unfair competitive practices, and making sure industries were working
at full capacity. It had generally improved workers pay and

(08:13):
working conditions, and it had cut down on some of
the competitive practices that were undermining the economic recovery, but
it was also blamed for things like making various goods
more expensive and slowing the pace of production. The government
still had a vested interest in this idea of removing
obstructions to interstate commerce, including obstructions that stemmed from labor disputes,

(08:35):
and labor activists were advocating for the protections that had
been part of the National Industrial Recovery Act to be restored.
This led to the National Labor Relations Act, introduced by
Senator Wagner and also called the Wagner Act, which was
signed into law on July sixth, nineteen thirty five. This
was an act to quote diminish the causes of labor

(08:56):
disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce, to create
a National Labor Relations Board, and for other purposes. The
Act applied to all employers involved in interstate commerce, with
the exception of airlines, railroads, agriculture, and the government. It
framed employer's refusal to respect their employee's right to unionize

(09:19):
or to accept collective bargaining as the cause of industrial
strife leading to strikes another unrest. The Act also noted
that companies have a lot more of power than their
employees do, especially when those employees aren't protected by a
fair contract or allowed to collectively bargain. It once again

(09:40):
legalized employee's right to organize and outlawed employer's interference with
that right, and it also empowered the National Labor Relations
Board to oversee this whole process and mediate disputes. But
since the Supreme Court had overturned the National Industrial Recovery Act,
many employers expected the National Labor Relations Act to be

(10:00):
struck down as well. Even though the law barred employers
from interfering with employees' right to unionize. Many employers kept
doing exactly that, things like hiring detectives to investigate, spy
on and harass union organizers and members, establishing company unions
that really represented the interest of the business rather than

(10:21):
its employees, and firing or demoting people who were suspected
of organizing or joining a union. So this brings us
to the US automotive industry and specifically to Flint, Michigan,
which we will get to after a sponsor break. The

(10:46):
American Federation of Labor was established in the late nineteenth
century to bring craft and trade unions together under one umbrella.
Its first member unions represented people like tailors, iron molders,
and carpenters, and in its early years, the AFL did
not work with industrial unions at all. Craft unions representing

(11:08):
people like carpenters were considered to represent skilled workers, while
industrial workers so people who worked on factory assembly lines
were thought of as unskilled. But around the time the
Wagner Act was passed, the AFL established a Committee for
Industrial Organization. This committee soon split off from the AFL

(11:32):
and it re established itself as its own organization, which
was the Congress of Industrial Organizations United Auto Workers, was
established in Detroit, Michigan, in nineteen thirty five, and at
first it became part of the AFL, and like the AFL,
its initial focus was mainly on the automotive industry skilled workers,

(11:53):
not the people who worked on assembly lines in factories.
But when the CIO split off from the AFL, the
United Autoworkers went too soon. The UAW was trying to
organize factory workers, especially at the Big three automakers, GM,
Ford and Chrysler. GM was the largest auto manufacturer in

(12:13):
the world at the time, with sixty nine plants in
thirty five cities, many in the Midwest. Initially, the UAW
focused more on GM and Chrysler because Henry Ford was
vehemently anti union. GM actively worked against these unionization efforts.
According to information unearthed and Senate committee hearings, between nineteen

(12:35):
thirty four and nineteen thirty six, GM spent more than
eight hundred thirty nine thousand dollars on labor detective services,
more than half of it paid to the Pinkertons. This
detective work involved everything from investigating union organizers to planting
spies within the union to harassing and threatening workers. This

(12:58):
Congressional committee described GM's spy work as quote a monument
to the most colossal supersystem of spies yet devised in
any American corporation. There are also reports that GM conscripted
an organization known as the Black Legion to intimidate and
threaten its employees. The Black Legion was compared to the

(13:20):
KKK and was aggressively anti union, and this went beyond
targeting the union itself and the workers at the factories.
Part of GM's union busting effort involved telling male workers'
wives that their husband's union activities were going to get
them fired, as well as convincing women that their husbands
were up to no good, suggesting that they were out

(13:43):
late partying or soliciting sex workers, or that they were
lying about the union and that they were really spending
their afterwork time having extramarital affairs. As UAW organizers tried
to unionize GM's factories, they were working against all of this,
and they were finding common themes among the workers' gravances

(14:03):
from plants a plant. A lot of it was in
line with what we already discussed, like firings that seemed
arbitrary or retaliatory. The factories were also poorly ventilated, and
during periods of hot weather, workers passed out or even
died from overheating, with their coworkers expected to keep working
until someone came to remove the body. Many of the

(14:26):
jobs were dangerous, including working around dangerous substances with no
ventilation or protective equipment. There was also an immense focus
on speed, to the point that workers on the assembly
line did not have time to go to the bathroom.
There was also nobody who could cover for a person
who became ill or injured on the job. Workers talked

(14:47):
about people who got sick during the day and kept
working on the assembly line even though they were vomiting.
There was also speed up during peak production times, with
workers expected to complete their tasks on the assembly line
at seemingly superhuman speeds. If a factory was in danger
of missing its daily quota, speed up would start near

(15:09):
the end of people's shifts, when they were already exhausted.
For many workers, take home pay was not the biggest issue,
but the way wages were calculated was a problem. Many
workers on the line weren't paid an hourly or a
daily rate. They were paid by the peace, and the
rate for each piece didn't necessarily stay the same. It

(15:30):
was often set at a higher amount at the start
of a pay period to encourage the workers to go
as quickly as possible, but then it would drop as
payday approached. People wound up making less than they expected,
and this whole shifting pay rate felt like a bait
and switch. Women working at the GM factories faced an
additional layer of hostility. Some reported being sexually harassed and

(15:53):
even assaulted by their supervisors, who would then use the
assault as leverage to try to guarantee the women compliance
at work. All of these factors fed into the sit
down strike. Most of the strikes that had taken place
in the United States before this point had involved workers
leaving their job sites and organizing things like picket lines, demonstrations, protests, pamphleteering,

(16:18):
and speeches. While the strike at GM in nineteen thirty
six and thirty seven still involved things like picket lines
and other activities outside the building, those were primarily the
work of the striking workers' supporters, because in a sit
down strike, employees stayed inside the factory, physically occupying it.
This strategy had some advantages for the striking workers. A

(16:41):
typical strike could only be effective if the vast majority
of the workers participated. If only a few people walked out,
the company could just redistribute their work among their coworkers
or higher replacements without too much trouble. But a sit
down strike allowed a smaller number of people to take
control of the whole workplace. Employers also couldn't simply hire

(17:02):
replacement workers to take over, since the striking workers had
control of the building. Remaining inside the workplace also gave
the workers more protection from violence. Employers were reluctant to
remove workers by force due to the risk of damaging
expensive machinery and equipment, but there were also some downsides.

(17:23):
Striking workers had to be separated from their families and
their friends who didn't work with them, depending on where
the strike was taking place. Striking workers didn't have access
to things like bathing facilities or adequate sleeping spaces, although
some of the GM strikers were able to make reasonably
comfortable beds with the padding that was used to make

(17:43):
car seats. Sit down strikes were also questionably legal at best,
since strikers were essentially trespassing. The idea that a few
workers could decide to go on strike and take over
the whole building also ran against the spirit of the
National Labor Relation Act, which was really focused on the
idea of a majority of employees forming a union em bargaining,

(18:06):
not on a smaller number of employees forcing the issue
by occupying the building. In the US, the first sit
down strike is generally noted as having happened in nineteen
oh six, when members of the Industrial Workers of the
World stopped working but stayed at their stations at a
General Electric factory in Schenectady, New York. Workers in Europe

(18:27):
started occupying their workplaces after World War One, including roughly
half of the metal workers in Paris in the spring
of nineteen thirty six, and that led to sweeping labor
reforms in France. In the US, workers at a rubber
plant in Akron, Ohio, sat down in early nineteen thirty
six as well. Fisher Body was a division of GM

(18:49):
and Fisher Body workers in Atlanta sat down at two
different points in October and November of nineteen thirty six,
with the November strike spreading to other plants in the
Atlanta area as well. Well. Workers at Bendix Products in
South Bend, Indiana sat down. In mid November and mid December,
workers sat down at two GM plants in Kansas City, Missouri,

(19:10):
and then at a body stamping plant in Cleveland, Ohio,
as well as the Kelsey Hayes wheel plant in Detroit, Michigan.
All of these were either divisions of or suppliers of GM.
On December sixteenth, nineteen thirty six, the UAW asked for
a meeting with GM upper management, but GM refused, maintaining
that any collective bargaining would have to happen at the

(19:33):
local level, from plant to plant. But the UAW argued
that the issues that it wanted to discuss, things like
recognizing the union for collective bargaining, a seniority system for workers,
and the tremendous speeds expected of workers on the line,
were things that applied for every GM factory in the nation.
Late December also wasn't ideal for the UAW to be

(19:56):
planning a huge strike. Most of GM's workers celebrated Christmas,
so this was just not a great time for people
to lose their wages or to be separated from their families.
Since many of GM's factories were clustered together, in the Midwest,
the weather at the end of the year would probably
not be all that conducive to things like the pickets
and the protests that were needed to support the strike.

(20:19):
And Michigan had elected a new governor, Frank Murphy, who
was expected to be far more sympathetic to organize labor
than his predecessor had been, but he was not going
to take office until January first. However, workers themselves took
this decision out of the uaw's hands, and we're going
to get to that after we pause for a sponsor break.

(20:50):
As the UAW tried to organize GM workers in Flint, Michigan,
GM tried to reduce its risk in the event of
a strike. On December twenty ninth, nineteenth six, the company
transferred union members out of its Chevrolet body stamping plant
in Flint that was known as Fisher Body Number two. Then,
on December thirtieth, the company started removing the dies that

(21:13):
were used to stamp out body parts from another Flint plant,
which was Fisher Body Number one. This was one of
only two sets of dyes that GM was using to
stamp out auto bodies, and their removal from the plant
represented not only a loss of jobs because the people
who did that work would not have work to do anymore,
but also a loss of leverage. If the workers took

(21:37):
over the plant with the dies still in it, that
would stop production on multiple models of GM cars. So
when the workers at Fisher I realized what was happening
with the dies, they immediately started a strike, taking over
the building and workers at Fisher iiO started striking on
the same day. There are also oral history testimony suggesting

(22:00):
that another factor might have been at work here as well.
Flat glass workers had also gone on strike and that
was leading to a potential glass shortage for car manufacturing.
If the factories in Flint ran out of glass, production
would shut down anyway, so workers decided to strike before
that could happen. The strike's organizers decided that only men

(22:23):
could occupy the plants during the strike, so while there
were women working at GM, they could not be part
of the sit down, but women's participation in other aspects
of the strike was absolutely critical. The Women's Auxiliary, which
was organized by twenty three year old Genora Johnson who
was later Genora Johnson Dollinger, set up a strike kitchen

(22:45):
to feed the striking workers and their families. They delivered
food directly to the factories. The Women's Auxiliary also did
the striker's laundry, and about three weeks into the strike,
they started a daycare for the striking workers' children. They
also brought to the factories to visit their family members,
and they picketed and did other work in support of
the strike. It took some time for some of these

(23:08):
efforts to get off the ground, in part because the
company had put so much effort into sowing distrust of
the union among the workers wives who support the Women's
Auxiliary needed. In oral histories recorded in the nineteen eighties
and nineties, women described going to the factories after the
strike started expecting to drag their husbands out of some

(23:29):
kind of debauchery or a radical communist frenzy, but then
staying to help make food once they realized what was
actually going on. Whether they worked at GM or not,
the women involved in the auxiliary faced hostility from company
supporters and the strike's critics, including people questioning their morality
and implying that they were sex workers. We should note

(23:52):
that while there was not like a stereotypical, screaming radical
conspiracy of communism happening in the strike. There were definitely
communists and socialists among the strikers and within the labor
movement in general. Both communism and socialism had and have
a focus on fair treatment of workers. This is not

(24:14):
really that surprising. Genora Johnson Dollinger, for example, had become
a socialist at the age of sixteen. She was one
of the more radical people involved with the strike, though
many others had a general interest in communist or socialist
ideals while not formally being a member of either party.
And we should also take a moment to note that,

(24:34):
at least as far as we know, all the women
in the auxiliary in Flint were white. Although GM did
employ black people in its factories, they were only hired
in janitorial rules or to work in the foundry. Only
one black employee, Roscoe van Zandt, is known to have
sat down in Flint during this strike. During the sit

(24:55):
down strike, workers inside the plants established rules for behavior,
including maintaining order, keeping things clean and organized, and mediating disputes.
As people were cooped up together for weeks, workers held
lectures and classes for one another. They read and played games,
and sang songs in order to keep their spirits up.
Songs included a union anthem called Solidarity Forever that was

(25:19):
sung to the theme of the Battle Hymn of the Republic,
and at first GM's response was mostly not to engage.
GM President Alfred P. Sloan stated quote, we will not
negotiate with a union while its agents forcibly hold possession
of our property, and Executive vice president William S. Knudsen
called the striking workers trespassers and violators of the law

(25:41):
of the land. GM also argued that the union's bargaining
efforts were not legal under the National Labor Relations Act
since fewer than half of the employees had joined the union.
The UAW countered that GM had illegally interfered with its
effort to get workers to join, preventing it from getting
a large your membership. On January second, GM got a

(26:03):
court order to have the striking workers removed from the factories,
but the workers refused to go. Then it became public
knowledge that the judge who issued this injunction, which was
Edward D. Black, owned a whole bunch of stock in GM.
It's the clear conflict of interest. People pretty much dropped
the subject of trying to get this injunction enforced. On

(26:26):
January fourth, the UAW submitted a list of demands, including
that the UAW be given exclusive recognition as the bargaining
agency for workers at GM, abolishing the piece work system,
a thirty hour work week with time and a half
for overtime, minimum pay rates, the reinstatement of people who
had been fired unfairly, a seniority system, and a speed

(26:49):
of production that was mutually agreed upon by managers and
a committee from the union. But GM continued to refuse
to negotiate. On January eleventh, nineteen thirty seven, GM turned
off the heat and electricity at Fisher II, even though
the temperature that day was only sixteen degrees fahrenheit or
almost negative nine celsius. They also locked the factory gate

(27:12):
to stop the women's auxiliary from delivering food. Workers and
their supporters broke the gate open, and that escalated into
a fight between law enforcement and the workers and their supporters.
The police used tear gas and they fired upon the workers,
and the workers defended themselves with things like fire hoses
and thrown door hinges. Women who were outside the plant

(27:36):
were also part of this fighting. They were armed with
things like homemade blackjacks and bars of soap stuffed down
in the toes of socks. At least sixteen workers and
eleven police were injured, with most of the worker injuries
coming from gunshot wounds. In a later oral history interview,
Genora Johnson Dollinger said of this moment, quote, I was frightened,

(27:57):
and you first lose all your power of thinking for
just a matter of moments, and then you become terribly,
terribly angry that armed policemen are shooting into unarmed men.
She used the uaw's loudspeaker car to call for women
to come to the factory and stand with the men,
banking on the idea that police should be reluctant to
shoot at a group of unarmed women. The striking workers

(28:20):
nicknamed this incident the Battle of the Running Bulls or
the Battle of bulls run with bulls being a slang
term for police, and some of the more radical women
in the women's auxiliary, including Genora Johnson Dollenger, decided to
form a new organization afterward, that being the Emergency Brigade.
Their job was to handle any emergency that arose during

(28:43):
the strike. This included using their own bodies to shield
the striking workers from the police, as they had done
on January eleventh, but it included other things too. For
the remainder of the strike, including at one point helping
a striking worker's wife give birth to a baby. The
Emergency Brigade were red berets and armbands with the letters EB,

(29:05):
and some members kept working with the Women's Auxiliary while
also working with the Emergency Brigade. After the violence on
January eleventh, the UAW and GM reached a tentative agreement.
The striking workers would leave the plants and GM would
start good faith negotiations, with the union not restarting production
until those negotiations were complete. Workers who had been striking

(29:28):
in other cities, including Cleveland and Detroit, left their plants,
but in Flint, the union heard that GM had also
agreed to meet with another organization called the Flint Alliance,
which the CIO and the UAW viewed as a company union.
So workers in Flint refused to leave the factories, and
GM asked Governor Frank Murphy to call out the National Guard.

(29:52):
There's also some suggestion that GM it looked like GM
wasn't going to abide by the promise to not restart
production until the negotiations were done. So after they contacted
the governor, Murphy did not act the way that many
people would expect the governor to act during such an incident.
He actually supported the worker's legal right to unionize them

(30:15):
to strike, and he was really afraid that using National
Guard troops to physically remove them would just lead to
people getting killed. So while Murphy did call out the
National Guard, their task was to keep a buffer between
the workers on one side and gm GM security guards
and police on the other. About twelve hundred National guardsmen

(30:37):
arrived in Flint on January twelfth. On February first, UAW
striker strategically took control of the Chevrolet Engine number four factory.
To do this, they staged a diversion, telling a company
stool pigeon that a strike was being planned at another factory,
Chevy nine. Police and security guards from other plants, including

(30:58):
Chevy four, converged on Chevy nine after hearing this rumor.
Police threw tear gas grenades into the plant and women
outside broke the windows to try to clear the air. Meanwhile,
workers took over the real target of Chevy Flour and
another group from the Emergency Brigade locked arms across the
gate and stood guard. The governor called in an additional

(31:20):
twenty two hundred National Guard troops, which surrounded Chevy four
and nearby Chevy two, once again establishing a barrier around
the striking workers and separating them from a force that
now included police, private security guards, sheriffs, deputies, and civilians
who had been deputized for this purpose. Chevy four built
the engines for all Chevrolet vehicles, so this effectively stopped

(31:44):
Chevrolet production throughout the company. At this point, the strike
was seriously affecting GM's production. In December of nineteen thirty six,
the company had built about fifty thousand cars. In February
of nineteen thirty seven, that number was only one hundred
twenty five. The strike grew to involving about one hundred

(32:04):
thirty five thousand workers in plants from thirty five cities
in fourteen states. President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged GM to
start seriously negotiating. On February second, another judge, Paul Godola,
who did not have a bunch of stock in GM,
issued another injunction, this one to take effect in twenty
four hours, again ordering the striking workers to leave the factories.

(32:29):
He also fined the union fifteen million dollars. Thousands of
supporters started gathering outside the occupied factories out of fear
that this injunction would inspire vigilantes or hired security to
try to remove the striking workers by force. It is
a random side note the governor actually did own stock
in GM as all this was happening, although that was

(32:51):
not known at the time, and since he was generally
on the striker's side, it wouldn't have had the same
connotations as Judge Black stock ownership even if it had
been known. This new injunction put the governor in a
pretty precarious position. He was required by law to honor it,
but he still really feared that doing so would lead

(33:12):
to a loss of life. This was not an unreasonable fear,
similarly to how businesses had thought the Supreme Court might
overturn the National Labor Relations Act. He also noted that
the Court had not weighed in on the legality of
sit down strikes, so he tried to delay. He made
some public statements calling the strike an unlawful seizure of property,

(33:35):
but he still didn't take steps to actually clear the factories. Instead,
he contacted the President again, encouraging Roosevelt to order GM
to the bargaining table. Alfred P. Sloan delegated GMS, negotiating
to Executive Vice President William Knudsen, along with representatives from
the company's finance and legal departments. On the workers side

(33:57):
was CIO President John L. Lewis, previously of United Mine Workers,
and UAW Vice President Wyndam Mortimer. The negotiations were held
in the office and jury room of Judge George Murphy,
brother of Governor Murphy, and Governor Murphy acted as a mediator.
Murphy kept both President Roosevelt and Secretary of Labor Francis

(34:18):
Perkins updated on their progress. Although Murphy tried to get
Judge Godola to delay the removal of the workers. On
February fifth, the judge issued a writ of attachment which
ordered the sheriff to arrest all the workers that were
occupying GM buildings and to bring them into court to
face charges of contempt. But, like the governor, Sheriff Thomas

(34:41):
Walcott had some serious reservations about doing this and he
would only agree to do it if he were explicitly
ordered to do so by the governor. He asked Murphy
for National Guard support. Murphy, of course, was not going
to directly order him to do this. He thought it
was going to get people killed. So Murphy informed the
judge that he thought they were really close to an agreement.

(35:04):
This was on a Friday, and the governor tried to
get everybody to just hold tight till after the weekend,
But by Monday, February eighth, GM and the UAW still
had not reached an agreement. Murphy kept trying to reassure
everyone that one was imminent, and he was later quoted
as saying, if I sent those soldiers right in on
the men, there'd be no telling how many would be killed.

(35:26):
It would be inconsistent with everything I have ever stood
for in my whole political life. An agreement between GM
and the UAW finally came on February eleventh, nineteen thirty seven,
forty four days after the start of the strike and
after zero people getting killed. Under the terms of this deal,
the strike would end and the striking workers would stop

(35:48):
occupying the plants. Those plants would resume operation. GM agreed
not to discriminate or retaliate against the employees for joining
a union or for having participated in the strike. GM
also agreed to start collective bargaining on February sixteenth, and
that bargaining was meant to address the grievances that the

(36:08):
union had presented to the company back in January. The
union agreed not to implement any more strikes or work
stoppages while that negotiation was taking place, although it was
not officially part of the agreement. GM also announced a
pay increase of five cents an hour, and in a
separate letter, Nudsen informed Murphy that for a period of

(36:29):
six months, GM would negotiate only with UAW, not with
any other union. Strikers in Chevrolet Plant number four voted
to have Roscoe van Zandt lead them out of the building,
trying to track down whether that five cents an hour
pay increase affected people who were being paid by the PEACE.
And I don't know, but there were people that were

(36:50):
not paid by the PEACE a lot of times not
working directly on the assembly line. So this first agreement
between GM and the UAW was not one that addressed
all those demands that the UAW had submitted back in January.
Some of those demands later became part of federal law,
including the Fair Labor Standards Act that was first passed

(37:11):
in nineteen thirty eight. Others were demands that the UAW
kept working toward at GM and at other auto manufacturers
for years. They weren't things that were just quickly wrapped
up in a round of collective bargaining that started on
February sixteenth, after the strike was over. Instead, this agreement's
major accomplishment was GM's recognition of the union and its

(37:32):
promise to participate in collective bargaining, and in that it
was enormously influential. It established the UAW as a legitimate
union in the auto industry, and its membership grew from
about ninety eight thousand to nearly four hundred thousand in
nineteen thirty seven alone, UAW started bargaining for workers for
many other US auto manufacturers, including Studebaker, Hudson, Packard, and Chrysler,

(37:58):
and four years after the fleet at strike at Ford,
the success in Flint also sparked an enormous increase in
union membership overall and a wave of sit down strikes
as people tried to get better pay and working conditions
There were one hundred and fifty sit down strikes in
the United States in nineteen thirty seven alone, about one

(38:19):
hundred of them in the area around Detroit, Michigan. About
half a million workers across the country went on strike,
and about two million joined a union between nineteen thirty
seven and nineteen thirty eight. These were not confined to
the auto industry or two industrial jobs. On February twenty seventh,
nineteen thirty seven, clerks at Woolworth stopped working and took

(38:40):
over stores for a week, winning a twenty percent pay
increase and union involvement in hiring decisions. In March, workers
at four locations of the hl Green department store chain
in New York City implemented sit down strikes. Incarcerated people
in Illinois and Pennsylvania went on strike as well, although

(39:01):
these strikers' demands were not met. In April of nineteen
thirty seven, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in National
Labor Relations Board versus Jones and Lachlan Steel Corporation, which
upheld the National Labor Relations Act. But over the course
of the year, public sentiment really turned against the proliferation

(39:21):
of sit down strikes. I mean the public had not
overwhelmingly supported sit down strikes in the first place, but
became a lot more critical. In the words of the
Detroit News, quote, sitting down has replaced baseball as a
national pastime, and citter downers clutter the landscape in every direction.
In late nineteen thirty seven, a Gallup poll found that

(39:43):
about seventy percent of Americans disapproved of sit down strikes.
Then in nineteen thirty nine, the US Supreme Court issued
a ruling in NLRB versus fan Steel Metallurgical Corp. Which
found that fan Steel had violated the Wagner Act, but
also that the the practice of the sit down strike
was quote a high handed proceeding without shadow of illegal right.

(40:06):
So labor organizers largely moved away from sit down strikes,
but they have been cited as an inspiration for sit
ins during movements for equal rights. Yeah, when we did
that episode, that sort of rounded up like the sip
In movement and the fish In movement and all of
those things. The first one that we talked about was
the Alexandria Public Library sit in, which was originally called

(40:27):
a sit down strike. Also, we are not going to
try to recap Then the next eighty five years of
labor history. Well, there are lots of stories within it
that we can tell at later times, and I mean
stuff that's been in the headlines within the last year
about everything from workers' rights to organize to like a

(40:48):
big corruption scandal at the UAW. All of that is
out of the scope of this podcast. Thanks so much
for joy us on this Saturday. If you'd like to
send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show

(41:09):
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.