The Strike of 1911: Workers Against the Barons

On the morning of April nineteenth, nineteen eleven, at nine o'clock, six thousand furniture workers walked off the job. It was one of the largest labor actions in Michigan history, and it happened in what was supposed to be America's model industrial city.

The grievances had been building for years. The average furniture worker put in six ten-hour shifts a week, earning roughly two dollars a day on a piecework system, meaning their pay depended on how many pieces they completed per shift. When production slowed, their wages dropped below poverty. A government report issued in nineteen seven had noted something remarkable: Grand Rapids led the nation in furniture output, but its workers were paid less than furniture workers in comparable cities. The city's prosperity was being built on wages held deliberately low.

The workers had three demands. They wanted a nine-hour workday at the same pay as ten hours. They wanted an end to piecework. And they wanted the right to organize, with an end to the blacklisting of union members. The furniture barons refused to negotiate at all. Instead, they imported strikebreakers from Chicago and from Ionia. Some of those strikebreakers arrived infected with smallpox.

The strike lasted four months. In the end, the workers lost. Leaders of the Dutch Christian Reformed Church publicly denounced the strike effort, carrying enormous weight in a community where the church was central. The workers voted three to one to return in August. Their formal demands were not met.

But the owners, quietly, increased wages and shortened hours anyway. They knew how close things had come to spinning out of control. And the political consequences ran deeper: in nineteen sixteen, the furniture barons successfully pushed a ballot initiative that collapsed the city's twelve-ward system into just three wards, consolidating their grip on City Hall. The workers lost the battle and felt the effects for decades afterward.