Breaking the Hard Ground: Class Confidence From the Flint Sit-Downs to Today
The most famous union win in American labor history was a product of the conditions and organizing momentum of the moment. But it was also made possible by structure building and collective experiences that generated class confidence.
On February 11, 1937—44 days after their occupations of the Fisher Body No. 1 and No. 2 plants began in Flint, Michigan—General Motors workers won a landmark agreement. The one-page document included commitments to union recognition and collective bargaining over wages, seniority, work-life balance, and other working conditions, and a prohibition on discrimination or retaliation against union members. In a supplementary letter sent to Michigan Governor Murphy, GM also agreed, for a six-month period, not to support or bargain with company unions, or any organization of GM workers other than the United Auto Workers.
Before the sit-downs, there were many reasons to believe conditions were not ripe for a breakthrough against the world’s most powerful corporation. In June 1935, only 4,481 GM workers—less than 3% of GM’s hourly workforce—were dues-paying UAW members. In Flint, only 757 out of over 40,000 workers were members, and many GM workers regarded this small minority as “paid agents of General Motors and would have nothing to do with them.”
General Motors routinely flouted the law to undermine union drives—illegally firing and blacklisting union activists, employing spies to surveil union activity, and calling in police to bust up union meetings and strikes. The Congressional La Follette Committee exposed that GM spent millions on its vast anti-union espionage network and was the largest industrial client of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Flint was a paradigmatic company town: city ordinances forbade the distribution of union leaflets and the use of sound equipment for union demonstrations.
When UAW Vice President Wyndham Mortimer first canvassed the clapboard shacks of Flint workers’ neighborhoods in 1936, he lamented that “a cloud of fear hung over the city, and it was next to impossible to find anyone who would even discuss the question of unionism.” As UAW Communications Coordinator Henry Kraus put it, “Suspicion—the result of years of stoolpigeon activity—had reached the stage of a mania among Flint workers. The usual remark was that you couldn’t trust your best friend; you couldn’t even trust your own brother.”
The sit-down strikers nevertheless succeeded spectacularly. By the middle of October 1937, just eight months after the sit-down settlement, 400,000 workers across multiple companies had joined the UAW-CIO. By 1938, US union membership more than doubled to 24%. When GM workers held union representation elections in 1940, a majority of workers in 48 GM plants across the country voted to join UAW. By then, workers across the American economy—in transportation, meatpacking, electrical equipment, and steel—had joined together into new, mass-membership industrial unions.
What enabled a relatively small group of workers to engage in such dramatic action, and more importantly, what made them correct to assume that they had a majority of coworkers on their side? What made Flint workers believe that a successful sit-down was possible—especially when there was real potential for supervisors, police, and anti-union workers to violently suppress their occupation? As the UAW celebrates its ninetieth anniversary this year amidst an all-out assault by the billionaire class, returning to these questions of organization is more important than ever for charting labor’s future.
