By Chris Mahin
It was a little like staging the Boston Tea Party inside a factory. More
than eight decades ago, bold trade unionists introduced a dramatic new tactic
to the USA: the sit-down strike.
This innovative method of fighting made its first
major appearance in Akron, Ohio in January 1936. For several weeks, Firestone
Tire & Rubber Company had been trying to speed up production in the truck
tyre department at its Plant One facility in Akron, a move the tyre-builders
vehemently opposed. In response, the plant manager sent a company spy into the
department to figure out ways to speed up the line. The company agent tried to
provoke a fight with Clayton Dicks, a union committeeman in the department. The
company accused Dicks of punching the company spy and knocking him out, and
suspended Dicks without pay for an entire week.
Outraged at the suspension, union tyre-builders
demanded that Dicks be reinstated. When the company refused, the tyre-builders
stopped work en masse.
In her book Industrial
Valley, Ruth McKenny described what happened next: “Instantly, the noise
stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. The tyre-builders stood in long
lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by the silence. …
Out of the terrifying quiet came the wondering voice of a big tyre-builder near
the windows: ‘Jesus Christ, it’s like the end of the world.’ He broke the
spell, the magic moment of stillness. For now his awed words said the same
thing to every man: ‘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. …
‘John Brown’s body,’ somebody chanted above the cries. The others took it up.
‘But his soul,’ they sang, and some of them were nearly weeping, racked with
sudden and deep emotion, ‘but his soul goes marchin’ on’.”
The sit-down began at exactly 2am on 29th
January, 1936 in the truck tyre department. It immediately spread to all the
other departments in Firestone Plant One in Akron. By the end of the first day,
all four of Plant One’s shifts had participated. (Plant One operated with four
shifts of six hours’ duration each.)
The next three
days, workers moved freely throughout the plant. They occupied the foreman’s
office and issued union cards. They did no work; the machines stood still.
Management officials could do nothing (except become increasingly more
furious). By the end of the third day, workers at Firestone Plant Two were
ready to support Plant One with their own sit-down.
Firestone officials settled the strike quickly,
worried that the strike’s demands would grow to include recognition of the
United Rubber Workers (URW), an industrial union founded just months before.
Fifty-five hours after production had ceased, Clayton Dicks was reinstated with
back pay at half his normal rate for the period of the suspension and the
sit-downers were paid at the same rate for the period of the sit-down. The
company agreed to negotiate about the base rate.
The battle at Firestone was the first time the
sit-down strike was used in a major industrial confrontation in the USA. The
Akron tyre-builders had learned about the tactic from Alex Eigenmacht, an
immigrant union printer in Akron. He had taken part in an ‘inside strike’ of
printers in Sarajevo, Serbia, and explained the reasoning behind it to a
delegation of Akron tyre-builders who visited him to ask for advice.
Firestone’s sit-down inspires others
Within days, the Firestone sit-down inspired similar actions at Akron’s other
huge tyre manufacturers – Goodyear and BF Goodrich.
Goodrich workers sat down on 8th and 9th
February, 1936.They were protesting a cut in the base rate of pay. The company
settled quickly (to avoid a battle over union recognition). On Friday, 14th February
1936, the tyre-builders of Goodyear’s Plant Two, Department 251-A, turned off
their machines and sat down to protest the lay-off of 70 men. The sit-downers
were worried that the lay-offs marked the first step in an effort by the
company to end the six-hour day and replace it with an eight-hour day.
The end of the
first day of the Goodyear sit-down, it was clear to the workers that the
company was not going to react the way that the management at Firestone and
Goodrich had done. At 9:30pm on 14th February, Fred Climer, the
Goodyear personnel manager, notified the 137 Goodyear sit-down strikers that
they were all fired. Then he locked the strikers inside the tyre-building room.
On Monday night, 17th February 1936,
Goodyear’s workers voted to strike over the issues of the lay-offs, speed-up
and hours of work. Within days, the company’s enormous Akron facility was shut
down. In a stunning display of organisation, the union ensured that each of the
160 gates stretching over 18 miles of company property were guarded by pickets
24 hours per day. Almost immediately, 160 picket shanties were built, picket
line supervisors appointed and strike rallies organised.
The strike
continued for 33 days, through one of the worst winters in Ohio history.
Finally, the strike ended on 21st March 1936. As a result of the
agreement, the 137 sit-downers were re-instated and an agreement was reached
limiting Goodyear’s discretion to increase hours without conceding any
restrictions on the workers’ right to strike.
These victories only intensified the struggle for
control of the shop floor. The sit-down movement continued through the end of
1936 as Akron workers staged at least 52 sit-down strikes between the Goodyear
settlement and the beginning of 1937.
The tactic of the sit-down spread to the car industry
and led to other dramatic events, such as the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike of
1937. From the car industry, it spread to many different places of work.
Between 1936 and 1939, American workers engaged in 583 sit-down strikes of at
least one day’s duration.
Sit-down strikes change people’s thinking
The wave of sit-down strikes during the 1930s changed the USA
profoundly. The act of sitting down altered the lives of the people who took
that step. “Now we don’t feel like taking the sass of any snot-nose college
foreman,” one worker said, describing the mood in the plant after the
sit-downs. “Now we know our labour is more important than the money of the
stockholders, than the gambling in Wall Street, than the doings of the managers
and foremen.”
The sit-down wave also provoked an intense public
debate over whether it was morally right to occupy the capitalists’ property
and about which set of rights is more important, human rights or property
rights. The champions of the sit-down strike pointed out that they were
continuing a long tradition in this country of defending human rights against
the tyranny of the powerful. When newspaper columnists and political officials
denounced the sit-downers for doing things that were illegal, they defiantly
reminded the public that the Boston Tea Party and John Brown’s raid on Harpers
Ferry were illegal too.
“It was once unlawful to picket,” one union activist
pointed out. “Every right, every liberty, every privilege … has been won … by
men who dared to defy some law – by men who dared to be ‘illegal’.” The UAW
called on its organizers to remind people of those who have defied the status
quo. “Destroy fear of jail by recalling the prison terms of William Penn, John
Brown and other famous Americans,” a UAW [United
Automobile Workers] statement urged.
The wave of sit-down strikes helped pave the way for
the emergence of a social contract between capital and part of labour. The
leaders of the CIO [Congress of Industrial
Organizations] argued that employers were better off
granting legal recognition to unions than running the risk of having workers
physically occupy their factories. “A CIO contract is adequate protection,”
declared John L Lewis of the United Mine Workers, “against sit-downs, lie-downs,
or any other kind of strike.”
A social contract emerges
Before the 1930s were over, the owners of the most important industries
in the USA had come to understand that John L Lewis was right. The leaders of
the capitalist class began to work with the most “responsible” labour leaders
to ensure a system of labour peace in the USA – one in which sit-down strikes
would “not be necessary.” A social contract was established – at least for some
workers. Workers in the large car, steel and rubber factories were unionised,
but the workers in the car-parts supplier plants, the small iron foundries, and
in the canneries and fields were not. The result was a labour peace that fenced
out more workers than it fenced in.
In the heyday of this social contract, having a union
job meant receiving good wages, access to health care, and the possibility of
owning a home and eventually drawing a pension.
This process could be seen in the rubber industry
after the sit-down strikes of the 1930s. In 1946, the URW succeeded in
obtaining a general wage increase with the ‘Big Four’ of the rubber industry –
Goodyear, US Rubber, Firestone and Goodrich – in one set of negotiations. The
first company-wide agreement came in 1947. By 1948, all the major rubber
companies had master agreements. In 1949, the URW began to demand better
pensions.
In 1982, the URW went on strike against what had
become the ‘Big Five’ (with the rise of Uniroyal) and 23 independent companies,
and won major wage increases and benefit improvements.
An industry begins to decline
During the prime years of the social contract, industry was still
booming in the USA. In 1950, the corporate offices of five of the six largest
tyre companies in the USA were located in Akron. That year, Ohio firms produced
more than one-third of the tyres and about 30 per cent of all other rubber
products used in the USA.
By the late 20th century, however, the
rubber industry went into decline in Ohio. Many production facilities moved to
other parts of the USA, especially the South. The same forces of globalisation,
de-industrialisation, and the rise of electronics that have devastated other
industries began to hit the rubber industry. In 1988, the Bridgestone
Corporation, a Japanese company, purchased Firestone. In 1994,
Bridgestone/Firestone unleashed what came to be known as the “war of ’94” against its employees, demanding that
the workers accept 12-hour shifts, increased worker contributions to the health
insurance plan, and pay based on productivity.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company provides another
example of this process. In 2007, the company employed about 80,000 people in
28 countries. In 2003, when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, active
union members and retirees went out of their way to ensure the company’s
survival. The United Steel Workers of America – which had merged with the URW
several years before – negotiated a contract that allowed Goodyear to cut wages,
healthcare benefits and pensions, and to close the Huntsville, Alabama plant.
Goodyear workers agreed to all that in exchange for job security commitments.
In 2005, Goodyear posted its highest profits in seven years and gave its top
executives large bonuses. Then, in 2006, Goodyear broke its promise, announcing
the closing of its Tyler, Texas plant – with 1,100 jobs – and insisted that the
workers agree to more concessions.
More than 15,000 members of the United Steel Workers
went out on strike against Goodyear on 5th October 2006. Workers
from 15 plants across the USA and Canada walked out to protest Goodyear’s
unfair contract proposals. (One of the union locals on strike was Local 2 in
Akron, the scene of the 1936 strike against Goodyear.) The strike in 2006
lasted 12 weeks and ended with Goodyear claiming that it had won a victory.
The social contract is torn to pieces
Clearly, the social contract is now being torn to pieces. Given this,
labour cannot continue to fight in the way that it did when times were good for
the best-paid workers. We will have to develop new tactics, new forms of
organisation – a new outlook.
Although our tactical situation is not the same as
that of the sit-down strikers, those workers still have much to teach us. We
should honour their bravery. We should emulate their willingness to take the
good suggestion of an immigrant worker and use a new tactic in the battle on
the shop floor. Perhaps most of all, we should absorb their defiant attitude,
their refusal to be intimidated. When the mass media of their day – the
right-wing newspapers – denounced their actions as illegal, the sit-downers
proudly pointed to the illegality of the Boston Tea Party and of John Brown’s
raid on Harpers Ferry, and described their sit-down strikes as continuations of
those noble efforts.
The sit-down strikers openly proclaimed that the human
rights of the workers who built tyres and cars and other commodities were more
important than the private property of the factory owners. The sit-downers were
crystal clear on the necessity to take the moral offensive against the enemy.
They saw the little communities they built for a few days inside the factories
in the course of seizing control of their workplaces as a model of how human
beings could treat one another when the factory owners were no longer in
charge. The sit-down strikers made no apologies for fighting for a new world;
neither should we.
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