The Sit-Down Strike: Akron's Labor Revolution
Near Akron, Ohio
By the winter of nineteen thirty-six, Akron's rubber workers had had enough. Goodyear's management had announced plans to reduce hourly wages and switch from six-hour shifts to eight-hour shifts, which meant fewer workers would be needed to produce the same amount of rubber. The newly formed United Rubber Workers union, barely a year old, decided to respond.
But instead of walking out, which would leave the plant available for replacement workers to enter, some workers tried something different. They sat down inside the factory and refused to leave. They occupied the machines. They kept management from running the plant without them, without ever formally abandoning it. The tactic had been tried in a smaller General Tire strike in nineteen thirty-four, and it had worked. Now they used it at Goodyear.
On February seventeenth, nineteen thirty-six, the Goodyear strike officially began. At its peak, as many as ten thousand workers were involved. Picket lines stretched across miles of Akron streets. Sympathizers brought food. Community members stood watch through Ohio's February cold.
The strike lasted about a month. It ended on March twenty-second with Goodyear conceding on layoffs by seniority, six-hour shifts, and regular meetings with the union, though management never formally signed an agreement. It was a signal moment: one of the earliest victories for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, which had committed to organizing workers in mass industries that the older craft unions had largely ignored.
The sit-down tactic spread immediately. That same year and the next, workers at General Motors in Flint, Michigan used it to force one of the largest corporations on earth to recognize their union. The strategy born in Akron had gone national.
