The Sit-Down Strike, Fisher Body Plant Number One
Near Flint, Michigan
On the night of December thirtieth, nineteen thirty-six, autoworkers at General Motors' Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint sat down on the factory floor and refused to leave. They did not walk out. They stayed in. And that decision changed the balance of power between American workers and American corporations forever.
The sit-down tactic was deliberate. If the workers walked out, General Motors could hire replacements and keep producing cars. If they stayed inside and occupied the equipment, the company could not run the machines without risking damage to its own property. The strikers understood leverage.
The grievances were real: unsafe conditions, arbitrary speedups, wages that still left men struggling, and managers who could fire a worker for anything they chose. The United Auto Workers union was young, fragile, and largely unrecognized. General Motors was, at that moment, the most powerful corporation in the world.
For forty-four days, the workers held the plants. Their wives and mothers and sisters organized the Women's Auxiliary to bring food to the occupiers every day, passing meals through windows. When police and company guards attacked Fisher Body Plant Number Two on January eleventh, nineteen thirty-seven, in what workers later called the Battle of the Running Bulls, the Women's Emergency Brigade smashed windows to let in fresh air and clear out tear gas. Twenty-three-year-old Genora Johnson Dollinger organized that brigade and grabbed a sound truck to broadcast to the crowd outside, keeping the strikers from being overwhelmed.
Michigan's governor, Frank Murphy, refused to send the National Guard in to break the strike. The company could not get an injunction enforced. On February eleventh, nineteen thirty-seven, General Motors signed a one-page agreement recognizing the UAW.
It was the beginning. Within months, United States Steel recognized the Steelworkers. Within years, industrial unionism had spread across American manufacturing. The wages and benefits that built the American middle class trace directly back to what happened on this factory floor in Flint.
