There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Sloan was very pre–Wagner Act in his outlook, a member of the pioneering generation of tinkering automotive engineers such as his good friend Charles Kettering, GM’s head of research, who had electrified the automobile. He may not have fully grasped the extent to which the individuals who manned the assembly lines in the big auto plants had grown frustrated by increasing levels of automation and the speedups that disregarded their needs as human beings. “You have to run to the toilet and run back,” a worker in a Buick plant complained of the most basic human inconvenience. “If you had to … take a crap, if there wasn’t anybody there to relieve you, you had to run away and tie the line up, and if you tied the line up you got hell for it.”93 One wife of an auto assembly-line worker said that after a long shift “the children don’t dare go near him, he’s so nervous and his temper’s bad. And then at night in bed he shakes, his whole body, he shakes.” Another woman complained, “They’re not men anymore, if you know what I mean. They’re not men. My husband is only thirty, but to look at him you’d think he was fifty and all played out.”94

  On December 30, 1936, workers at two GM Fisher Body plants in Flint learned that management, fearing a UAW work stoppage just before a busy production season, was preparing to ship materials and dies used by the factory to other GM locations. The employees decided that the Fisher plants should be immediately shut down, but instead of walking out remained at their posts: they simply stopped working.

  The work-stoppage technique known as the sit-down, used initially in 1906 by the IWW at a General Electric facility in Schenectady, had resurfaced in February–March 1936 at a Goodyear rubber facility in Akron. As journalist Ruth McKenney reported, the shutting down of an assembly line by the workers who were its slaves was an emotional experience. “The whole room lay in perfect silence,” she reported of the first incredible moments after a line was turned off.

  The tire-builders stood in long lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by the silence. A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire tools. Now there was absolute stillness, no motion anywhere, no sound…. “We done it! We stopped the belt! By God we done it!” And men began to cheer hysterically, to shout and howl in the fresh silence. Men wrapped long sinewy arms around their neighbors’ shoulders, screaming, “We done it! We done it!”95

  The Fisher strike would be the first large-scale use of the sit-down, a tactic to which automobile assembly lines were especially vulnerable because manufacturing in the auto industry was based on the continuous flow of production, and the cessation of work by even a handful of men in one department could bring an entire plant to a halt. The sit-down had other advantages. Strikers operated on defensive territory, the inside of the factory, whose physical qualities they knew better than anyone. And workers remaining by their machines stymied any employer ideas about scabbing and put management in a position where, if it chose to retake its plant by force, a rush by police and any worker resistance would likely damage the premises. Management was even kept from turning off the heat on the strikers because insurance companies feared the men inside the building would then start fires to stay warm.

  Sit-downs also enjoyed a certain philosophical purity. For one thing, they were nonviolent. Rather than besieging a place of work from outside, as in most strikes, a sit-in was a protest in which the participants retained possession of that which they considered rightfully theirs. “Just sitting on our jobs,” was the expression the workers used. To maintain the strike’s integrity and deny employers any excuse to send in police or soldiers, those occupying the plant allowed no vandalism to the machinery or the building itself.

  It appeared the sit-downers might even have the law on their side. A Detroit prosecutor informed GM that, as the workers had entered the factory at the employers’ “invitation,” they could not be accused of trespassing; and because such a strike was not forbidden by statute, there was no basis for police to oust those inside.96

  GM nonetheless insisted that the strikers vacate the premises they occupied in Fisher Body plant No. 2 before any negotiations could occur. The strikers agreed to leave if GM recognized the union, leading GM’s Knudsen to complain to Homer Martin, “Collective bargaining cannot be justified if one party, having seized the plant, holds a gun to the other party’s head.”97 But John L. Lewis had seen enough of high-stakes labor disputes to know that corporations ceded nothing voluntarily; only through the interference with a company’s production and profits would labor win concessions from an uncooperative player like GM, and the Fisher plant strikers, with their effective sit-in, had the firm nicely cornered. The CIO thus backed the UAW wholeheartedly, Lewis emphasizing that as collective bargaining was now “the law of the land,” thanks to the Wagner Act, GM, not the strikers, was in defiance of that law.98

  When Secretary of Labor Perkins queried President Roosevelt about the matter, she found his views rather relaxed. “Well, it’s illegal, but what law are they breaking?” the president said. “The law of trespass, and that is about the only law that could be invoked.”

  And what do you do when a man trespasses on your property? Sure, you order him off. But shooting it out and killing a lot of people because they have violated the law of trespass somehow offends me…. There must be another way. Why can’t these fellows in General Motors meet with the committee of workers? Talk it all out. They would get a settlement. It wouldn’t be so terrible.99

  Roosevelt and Perkins, while formally voicing concern about the sit-down, took a wait-and-see approach; neither was inclined to endorse the use of force to oust the UAW men.

  Such was the standoff when, on January 2, GM obtained an injunction from Judge Edward D. Black ordering the strikers out of the plant. Quick-thinking UAW aides, however, discovered that Black owned 3,365 shares of GM stock valued at $219,000. The UAW immediately shared this information with the press, forcing GM to back off the injunction, its judge clearly compromised. GM then demanded that the militia be called in to dislodge the strikers, but Michigan governor Frank Murphy, along with Perkins and Roosevelt, thought that a poor idea. Murphy, a former judge and mayor of Detroit known for his determination to aid the unemployed and for his restraint of the police, had been swept into the governor’s chair as part of Roosevelt’s landslide win in 1936. As mayor he had acted on the faith that unions were a potential means of stabilizing industrial society, actively encouraging the city’s workers to seek expanded rights, including unemployment insurance and an end to court injunctions aimed at labor activity.100 Murphy believed the UAW was in the right to force GM to honor the terms of the Wagner Act.

  With the government appearing to side with the union, the strike soon spread to dozens of other GM plants across the country, seriously curtailing production of GM’s Chevrolet and Cadillac lines. Significantly, the other major carmakers—Ford, Chrysler, Nash, and Packard—far from showing solidarity with GM, continued manufacturing, thus compounding GM’s predicament.

  Ten days into the standoff GM decided it had had enough. Shortly after nine o’clock in the evening of January 11 police approached Fisher Body plant No. 2 and ordered the strikers out, then, moments later, smashed windows at the entrance and began firing tear-gas canisters inside. The strikers, who had anticipated such an incursion, drove the invaders back with “coffee mugs, pop bottles, iron bolts, and heavy automobile door hinges.”101 Local UAW leader Victor Reuther, who was outside in a “union sound car” with amplification equipment and a rooftop speaker, began shouting advice and encouragement to the men inside the building. “We wanted peace!” he shouted. “General Motors chose war. Give it to them!” Workers had made makeshift slingshots by stretching inner tubes across iron pipes, and from the plant’s roof “let loose a barrage of pound-and-a-half hinges,” Reuther recalled.102

  Driven back once, the cops tried a second assault with the tear gas, although the wind blew much of it back in their faces. At the same time, strikers
activated the building’s fire hoses, spraying the cops with water in the frigid air. Their retreat was hindered by UAW pickets stationed outside the plant, who pelted the fleeing officers with snowballs and pieces of asphalt pried from the parking lot; at one point they surrounded a sheriff’s squad car and rocked it back and forth with him inside it. Infuriated at their failure to take back the factory, some officers drew revolvers and fired into the crowd, prompting a female picketer to grab the microphone in Reuther’s car and shout, “Cowards! Cowards! Shooting unarmed and defenseless men!”103 Thirteen pickets were wounded in the fray, and nine policemen suffered injuries, mostly from being struck on the head by objects hurled from the building. The strikers, stunned but pleased to have beaten back not one but two police assaults, hurriedly erected a stronger barrier of cars before the entrance.104

  However much observers might privately enjoy the news that “unarmed” strikers, using whatever weapons came to hand, had successfully resisted the attempt to roust them, such violence against uniformed officials could not be condoned. Governor Murphy had no choice but to order National Guardsmen into Flint, although he stopped short of authorizing them to do anything beyond keeping order on the streets. He did induce UAW and GM to meet for talks, which produced a truce proposal that involved the workers exiting the premises and GM agreeing not to bargain with anyone but the UAW. This arrangement, however, scheduled to start January 17, stalled when UAW representatives learned that GM meant to include in the negotiations the head of a GM company union called the Flint Alliance; suspecting “a double-cross was in the offing,” the workers continued to occupy the plant.105

  On January 31 GM requested a new court order to clear the premises, this time being careful to seek out a judge with no financial interests in GM. But the strikers were also busy. On February 1, in a diversionary maneuver, they provoked fighting with police guards in front of a ball-bearing factory known as Chevrolet No. 9. When cops from the surrounding area rushed to the scene, a second group of strikers invaded Chevrolet No. 4, an engine-making plant that had remained open during the strike. After chasing floor bosses and nonunion workers out of the building, the strikers began a sit-down in No. 4, occupying a facility even more central to GM’s production system, for the engines for Chevrolet cars, the corporation’s best seller, were built there.

  The next day GM obtained the injunction it wanted, which gave the strikers until three o’clock on the afternoon of February 3 to depart the GM buildings and carried a potential fine of $15 million to the UAW if the injunction was disregarded. This placed the matter back in the governor’s office, since militia would be required to enforce the injunction. Murphy got little help from CIO chief Lewis, who with his usual flair for melodrama told him that if troops stormed Chevrolet No. 4, “I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then, when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike.”106

  Murphy heard from the strikers, as well, who in a telegram reminded him that their sit-down was peaceful and designed to force GM to “obey the law and engage in collective bargaining.” They further vowed that they would resist again with force if assaulted. “The police of the city of Flint belong to GM,” the UAW workers wrote. “The sheriff of Genesee County belongs to GM. The judges of Genesee County belong to GM…. It remains to be seen whether the governor of the state also belongs to GM.”107

  Murphy wrestled with the decision. As governor he could not ignore a court injunction, but as a labor-friendly politician with aspirations to national office he could hardly side with GM against strikers who largely had the public’s sympathy and with whom he essentially agreed. He chose to resist calls to order the state militia to enforce the injunction. “I’m not going down in history as ‘Bloody Murphy,’ ” he averred. “If I sent those soldiers right in on the men there’d be no telling how many would be killed. It would be inconsistent with everything I have ever stood for in my whole political life.”108

  To buy time, Murphy brought GM’s Knudson together with John L. Lewis, a move backed by President Roosevelt, who strongly urged Knudson and Lewis to find a solution. Knudson had as GM’s strongest bargaining chip the fact that the strikers were defying a court injunction; Lewis felt secure in the knowledge that Governor Murphy would not likely order the militia to enforce it and that Roosevelt desired an outcome in which GM conceded collective bargaining rights to the autoworkers. On February 11, after forty-four days of the sit-down, a four-page agreement emerged: the workers would exit the plants; for a six-month period GM would bargain only with the UAW; it would not interfere with workers seeking to join the UAW or blacklist workers who had struck; the firm would also call off the court injunction and address employee grievances. Lewis credited Governor Murphy with creating the negotiation that led to the settlement, while an exhausted Knudsen told reporters simply, “Let us have peace and make cars.”109

  The UAW failed to win the eight-hour day or the thirty-hour week it had sought, but had set in motion the process that would ultimately unionize the U.S. auto industry, and the workers who finally departed GM property to their supporters’ cheers and applause seemed to know they had done something valorous and possibly historic. The pact with the nation’s largest corporation had made collective bargaining rights inevitable everywhere. “When the boys came out, I never saw a night like that and perhaps may never see it again,” recalled one witness. “I liken it to some description of a country experiencing independence.”110

  THE UAW VICTORY GREATLY ENHANCED the CIO’s reputation, while popularizing the sit-down. In the immediate aftermath of Flint it was this last result that most worried Main Street, for suddenly sit-down strikes were everywhere—in textile mills, glass factories, breweries, even Woolworth Five and Dimes—and wherever they appeared they continued to attract headlines and public support. In Gillespie, Illinois, 450 coal miners staged their own version—a “stay-down,” in which they occupied part of a mine 360 feet belowground and refused to leave pending new restrictions on the introduction of machines into the mine works.111 Sit-downs were also taken up by groups with grievances against government, such as those protesting evictions or demanding greater public relief. Even members of a National Guard unit that had been on duty at Flint sat down when their pay was not forthcoming. Nine hundred sit-downs were recorded between 1935 and 1937, Time magazine suggesting that “sitting down has replaced baseball as [the] national pastime.”112

  The CIO also won a crucial breakthrough in steel. Beginning in 1936 the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), chaired by CIO vice president Philip Murray, had tackled the difficult challenge of organizing the steel industry, which for the half century since Homestead had successfully resisted outside unionization. The aim was to get the nation’s largest steel producer, U.S. Steel, to agree to recognize SWOC, with the idea that other steel companies would then also fall into line. U.S. Steel maintained large company unions that had actually shown signs lately of resisting management, an insurrectionary trend that allowed CIO members to infiltrate these unions and sway members to align with SWOC.

  CIO president Lewis, meanwhile, played an essential role. Riding high on the Wagner Act, Lewis was convinced that only “a madman or a fool” would try to deny the industrial organizing of workers, “this river of human sentiment,” as he called it, which could no longer “be dammed or impounded by the erection of arbitrary barriers of restraint.”113 On January 9, 1937, he encountered Myron C. Taylor, chairman and CEO of U.S. Steel, in the dining room of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington; a brief discussion led to several additional meetings over the next few days in which Lewis set out to persuade Taylor that unionization would bring stability to the steel industry.

  Taylor was a successful financial wizard brought in to help guide U.S. Steel through the Depression, and as a result he did not possess the ingrained contempt for unions that often characterized major industria
lists. The passage of the Wagner Act had certainly suggested to Taylor the shifting landscape of U.S. industrial relations. Roosevelt’s aims for an expanded government guardianship of working people had been endorsed at the polls, Lewis pointed out, and New Deal reforms were having a salutary impact on growth and production; it was time for capital to afford labor an enlarged stake. But however vigorous Lewis’s arguments, Taylor was likely most influenced by the hopeful financial news coming from Wall Street: the economy was beginning to rebound; and with U.S. Steel’s profits increasing for the first time in years, this was hardly the moment for a crippling strike, which, it had been rumored, might take place as soon as April.

  By the time the two men met again in mid-February, word had arrived of the UAW’s win in the protracted sit-down strike against General Motors. The CIO’s handling of the auto strike, in which Lewis had been much involved, and the helpful attitude taken by President Roosevelt and Michigan governor Frank Murphy, helped convince Taylor that it made sense for U.S. Steel to also seek a meaningful employee pact. On March 2, U.S. Steel, the descendant of the mighty Carnegie conglomerate that had, after Homestead, clobbered unionized steelworkers, formally recognized the SWOC, announced a 5 percent wage hike, and accepted the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week. In what became known as “the Myron Taylor Labor formula,” the company also agreed to respect its employees’ right to bargain collectively “through representatives freely chosen by them without dictation, coercion or intimidation in any form or from any source.”