Flint Sit-Down Strike

After the United Auto Workers or UAW formed in 1935, American auto workers began a series of sit-down strikes in some of General Motor’s smaller plants in Atlanta, Kansas City and Cleveland the following year, striking for increased wages and improved working conditions during some of the bleakest days of the Great Depression.

Dismally Low Pay

While the federal government had determined in 1935 that an annual salary of $1,600.00 was the absolute minimum on which a family of four could survive, GM workers earned a miserable $900.00, while the company spent a whopping $839,000.00 on private thugs known as “The Black Legion” intent on intimidating UAW members, and when auto workers took control of GM’s Flint Michigan die casting plant on December 30th, 1936—where just two sets of dies stamped out the majority of GM’s car bodies—the action dropped the auto giant to its knees.

Multiple Lawsuits by GM

GM argued that the strikers were trespassing, yet multiple court orders failed to remove the workers from their sit-down takeover of the Flint facility. Outside supporters supplied the workers with food and other necessities, and when GM turned off the heat to the buildings, the strikers simply wrapped themselves in coats and blankets and hunkered down.

Paid Thugs and Police

On January 11th, 1937, police and company thugs tried to cut off the striker’s food supply, resulting in a riot quickly named by strikers as the “Battle of the Running Bulls,” which injured 16 workers and 11 policemen. Plummeting GM’s production of cars from 50,000 units in December to just 125 in February, after Michigan Governor Frank Murphy refused to use force to break the strike, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent in the National Guard, but the guns of the Guard were not aimed at the striking workers, but at the police and hired goons, in a clear warning to leave the workers alone, and for GM to recognize the worker’s grievances.

Successful Strike

Now considered one of the most successful strikes of the 20th century, the 44-day sit-down strike ended on February 11th, 1937, when GM President Alfred P. Sloan announced a $25 million pay raise, which in turn saw UAW membership rise from 30,000 to a half million members that same year, making the Flint Sit-down Strike of 1937, the first major win for organized labor in America.