Organized Labor Took a Huge Step Forward When GM Workers Sat Down in Unison in 1937
Instead of picketing, striking autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, tried a bold tactic that gummed up the works and forced the company to recognize their union
As the clocks struck noon on January 11, 1937, roughly 100 men camped on the second floor of a Flint auto plant suddenly found themselves without heat. Under normal circumstances, there might have been 1,000 workers inside the Fisher No. 2 facility, bustling to produce auto bodies, sending 450 of them to a Chevrolet assembly facility across the road every 24 hours. But the day’s more austere climate owed itself to decidedly unusual circumstances.
On December 30, the men inside the plant had joined fellow workers in a daring strike action with the aim of forcing a reluctant General Motors to recognize their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). Eschewing the traditional method of picketing outside, their primary chosen tactic—the sit-down strike—was as disruptive as it was rare. As Greg Zipes, an attorney who teaches at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, has written: “Workers stay at their workstations” to “prevent any other workers, presumably non-union strikebreakers, from taking their place.” Because the processes involved in automobile production were so tightly integrated, relatively small numbers of workers placed at strategically chosen choke points could effectively paralyze production even at an industrial leviathan like G.M.
Since the sit-down had begun, the thousands of strikers had passed the time in relative peace, undisturbed by G.M. management and the police. But, feeling a sudden burst of winter air at midday, the workers realized something was afoot. Sure enough, the company had switched off the heat, and company guards outside were also blocking the delivery of food, marking the first in a series of escalations that culminated in a violent clash that night.
Did You Know? What are other famous sit-in protests?
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The 1937 sit-down strike in Flint was a national sensation. That same year, many workers emulated the tactic, including at Woolworth’s in New York and at the Hershey Chocolate Company in Pennsylvania.
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By the year's end, almost half a million U.S. workers had participated in a sit-down strike.
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The tactic lost its luster in 1939, when the Supreme Court ruled that employers could fire workers for sit-down strikes in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp.
When police arrived to relieve the beleaguered guards, they began hurling tear gas and eventually fired bullets and buckshot at the strikers. The workers replied in kind with water from fire hoses and ad hoc projectiles. “It was like a war or revolution,” a union photographer who witnessed the melee recalled, “with broken glass and lumps of coal and hinges from Chevrolets.” At least nine police and 14 strikers were injured; most of the latter suffered bullet wounds.
Receiving news of the battle a little over 50 miles away at his office in Lansing, Michigan’s newly inaugurated Governor Frank Murphy promptly decided to intervene. Accompanied by the state’s police commissioner and the adjutant general of its National Guard, he set out to visit Flint. In any other state, Murphy’s arrival might have easily been the prelude to an even more dangerous confrontation. But in Flint, once word reached the auto workers that Murphy was en route and planned to send in troops, the atmosphere was one of jubilation: The governor was interceding on their behalf. With the clash still raging, 25-year-old organizer Victor Reuther, then outside the buildings in a car with an exterior sound system, seized on the news to taunt the police: “You’d better go home before Governor Murphy gets after you!”
Reuther’s optimism was soon to be vindicated. On Murphy’s orders, a throng of armed guardsmen arrived the next morning and took up positions outside the occupied factories to create a buffer between the strikers and local authorities. Officially, according to the governor’s neutrally worded public statements, the troops’ role was simply to preserve order and prevent further violence. Unofficially, their deployment represented an unprecedented political intervention on the side of organized labor and ultimately enabled the auto workers to defeat one of the world’s largest corporations and score a monumental union victory that would help define American labor relations for decades to come.
When workers at the two Flint G.M. plants had abruptly gone idle at their machines and refused to move in December 1936, they ignited an industrial dispute in the automotive heartlands of Michigan that quickly spread to plants in Toledo, Ohio, and Janesville, Wisconsin. Lasting 44 days and involving some 136,000 workers, the strike had been decades in the making. Well before the mid-1930s, Flint was an important center of industrialization. As a leading producer of carriages in the late 19th century, it was already an established hub of transport manufacturing by the time G.M. was founded in 1908, earning the moniker “Vehicle City.” The ensuing decades saw a boom for American cars, as new factories sprang up and vehicles streamed off the assembly lines in ever-greater numbers—and sales accordingly increased nearly 25-fold between 1910 and 1929. Flint’s population exploded, too, rising to 156,492 by 1930—roughly 12 times its population when the century began.
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This article is a selection from the March 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
G.M., in turn, soon grew into a globe-spanning industrial colossus, and by the mid-1930s it had more than 60 plants across 14 states, the cars and trucks produced by its 171,711 hourly workers accounting for an astonishing 37 percent of all global sales. Like most of their fellow industrial workers in the 1930s, though, the company’s laborers received no sick benefits, pension plans or paid time off, and they lacked basic job security—in stark contrast to many of G.M.’s white-collar and managerial staff, whose employment often came with insurance and sick pay. Industrial work could be incredibly dangerous, and safety precautions were virtually nonexistent; one Buick metalworking shop was so prone to injuries that it was nicknamed “the slaughterhouse.”
Things worsened with the Depression, which created an unemployment pool so vast that G.M. could, and did, treat its workers as more or less disposable and fired them at will. Wages were paid out only if the line stayed running, and the company sometimes punished workers with cuts to their hourly pay for failing to meet quotas. “Working conditions were atrocious,” one former employee reflected to a BBC documentary crew several decades after the strike. “The line was so fast you didn’t have time to go to the restroom.” When he got home after work, “I would clean up and go to bed. I couldn’t even eat. I was that tired.”
Yet against this bleak backdrop, the political ferment of the emerging New Deal era saw both a growing climate of worker militancy and a newfound pro-labor bent among some of the country’s leading Democratic politicians. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act established a legal framework for unions—though amid legal challenges by big employers, the legislation rested on shaky ground, and actually organizing a union, especially in the automotive sector, remained incredibly difficult. G.M. was determined to crush even the thought of any collective action, and throughout the mid-1930s it surveilled its employees so aggressively that a subsequent congressional inquiry dubbed its contract with the Pinkerton detective agency “a monument to the most colossal super--system of spies yet devised in any American corporation.” Despite the company’s best efforts to cover up such espionage, G.M. official Merle Hale conceded as much, saying in his testimony before a 1937 Senate committee that he had retained the Pinkerton agency because he wanted to know the source of labor dissatisfaction—-as well as monitor meetings with labor organizers and track criticisms of management.
Working under another labor group, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), the fledgling UAW launched an organizing drive in the summer of 1936 but found only modest success. Its efforts, however, were soon buoyed by Roosevelt’s landslide re-election in the November presidential contest—and, closer to home, by the concurrent election of Democrat Murphy as Michigan’s governor. A lawyer of Irish descent and a devout Catholic with an innate sense of justice, Murphy had campaigned aggressively for labor support and arguably owed his own narrow victory to workers’ votes.
While other Democratic governors, like Ohio’s Martin L. Davey, had no qualms about deploying troops against striking workers, Murphy proved remarkably resistant to repeated calls for the use of force, even as the UAW made use of the radical and disruptive sit-down tactic.
From G.M.’s point of view, the sit-downers were illegally trespassing, plain and simple. In this spirit, the company duly secured an injunction from State Circuit Judge Edward D. Black for their removal. But Murphy refused to enforce it. When G.M. escalated by cutting off the heat at Fisher No. 2 on January 11, the governor responded by making his most consequential and fateful intervention in the strike: Murphy demanded that the company restore heat in the plants and ordered Michigan’s Welfare Department to provide direct food aid to the striking workers. And while Murphy played the role of neutral mediator in public, he effectively sided with the union by deploying the National Guard as a buffer, privately telling UAW organizer Robert Travis and CIO leader John L. Lewis that the troops would protect the strikers inside and outside the plants and prevent their ejection. Even by the pro-labor standards of the New Deal era, Murphy’s conduct during the strike made him an outlier among Democratic governors.
With sit-downs protected, the union was soon able to go on the offensive with a daring feint. On February 1, workers at Flint’s relatively insignificant Chevrolet No. 9 facility launched a mock sit-down action that lured G.M. guards to converge on the scene, enabling other workers to blockade themselves inside the more strategically valuable Chevrolet No. 4, which made engines for Chevrolets. “We have the key plant of the G.M., and the eyes of the world are looking at us,” one worker who participated in the action wrote in a letter to his wife. “We shure [sic] done a thing that G.M. said never could be done.” Served with a new court injunction ordering them to leave the occupied plants, the workers held their ground and, on the morning of February 3, their ranks swelled, as fellow UAW members and other supporters came in from Detroit and Toledo in a mass gesture of solidarity. By the afternoon, some 3,000 picketers had assembled outside Fisher No. 1, as other strikers occupied Flint’s main arterial road and paraded through its downtown. Amid this show of strength, G.M. soon had no choice but to yield.
On February 11—having produced a mere 151 cars in the United States since February 1—the company capitulated and officially pledged to recognize the UAW in a signing ceremony presided over by Murphy himself. Victorious workers streamed out of their factories and formed a triumphant procession. “They marched and they sang and they danced all night long in the streets of the City of Flint,” organizer Genora Johnson Dollinger recalled in a 1976 documentary. “Buick workers and A.C. workers [from a nearby G.M. spark plug plant]—these plants weren’t even on strike—came down and they celebrated with us.” Murphy, though, was defeated in his bid for re-election as governor in 1938—in part because of a backlash from pro--business forces following his intercession in the strike. He would go on to serve as U.S. attorney general and sit on the Supreme Court.
Ultimately, says Harry R. Rubenstein, curator emeritus in the Division of Political History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the strike should be remembered as a “story of how individual workers, unorganized, decide to take a militant kind of [tactic] to change the balance of power between labor and business....And it wouldn’t have happened without the New Deal.”
“It was the biggest, most important corporation in the world being challenged—-and successfully challenged—by labor,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It was, unquestionably, the most consequential strike of the 20th century....Once they win [in Flint] and they have a signed contract...hundreds of thousands of workers pour into the UAW, and other managers, other capitalists, say ‘OK, if the most important company in the world is signing with a union, well, maybe we better do it, too.’”
Thinking back nearly 40 years later, one retired worker explained: “Today, I’m sitting here with over $600 a month [in] pension. It all came through organized labor. At my old age, I’m able to sit around and do what I want to. They got 40 years of me down there, the best of my life, and now I’m able to enjoy a little bit of it. And if we hadn’t [struck], we wouldn’t have had nothing. ... We had to do it.”
A City Within a Factory
The G.M. strikers established a whole parallel society, with processes for governance, logistics management and even entertainment
By Jacqui Shine
Meals on Wheels (and Pulleys): Operating from a sympathetic owner’s restaurant across from Fisher No. 1 and directed by cooks from a Detroit culinary union, the strike kitchen and its many volunteers churned out three meals a day, plus coffee and dessert, for as many as 2,000 people. Of the hundreds of pounds of food used each day, some was bought by the union; the strikers’ food committees also sent men to solicit donations from bakeries, doughnut shops, grocers and farmers. Local striking bus drivers ferried hot meals to the plants in giant kettles and ten-gallon milk cans, and wives of the strikers brought food for their husbands, to be hoisted through the windows.
Clean as a Whistle: Strike leadership stressed the necessity of health and order. At 3 p.m. each day, Fisher No. 1’s sanitation committee threw open the windows and sent everyone through the plant to clean up. Rules forbade skipping cleanup, abandoning dirty dishes and littering. Tobacco chewers were encouraged to spit into provided plates filled with sand, and smoking areas were restricted; the men were expected to shower daily. Assigned workers would keep the idle plant and its equipment clean and thoroughly maintained. Though the Flint Journal later claimed that the Fisher No. 1 employees left behind “wanton destruction, filth and disruption,” visitors—reporters, state officials and at least one sympathetic shareholder—reported they’d always found the facilities clean and well tended.
An Evening's Entertainment: The strikers’ daily 7 p.m. all-hands meeting was always preceded by some sort of entertainment. A local theater impresario sent in visiting tap dancers and singing troupes. There were movies, too, including a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Theatrical ensembles staged skits about labor issues; there were also impromptu talent shows and even a dance contest that culminated with an invigorating hula. On typical nights, rousing rounds of the traditional union anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” opened and closed the meetings. Afterward, at two plants, workers’ orchestras—which might include mandolin, guitar, banjo, accordion and harmonica—played 8 p.m. concerts, broadcast over loudspeakers to picketers and supporters outside. “I never knew we had so many entertainers in this little shop,” remarked Francis O’Rourke of Fisher No. 2.
Order in the Court: Rule violators were hauled before the plants’ “kangaroo courts,” where “usually a gray-haired old-timer” (in the words of reporter George Morrisone) served as judge. Prosecutors and defense attorneys argued before peer juries, and the men all kept their hats off, but this solemnity was out of keeping with the often-comic nature of the crimes. The worst offense was shirking one’s work; the sentence in such cases was extra work. Other serious crimes included spreading rumors and bringing alcohol into the plants. In at least one case, the guilty party was obliged to make a rousing speech. A journalist writing in Harper’s found “more substantial and original humor in a single session of the Fisher strikers’ kangaroo courts than in a season of Broadway musical comedies.”
Keeping Busy: Even with six hours of work each day—which might include picket duty, outside patrol or manning the “information window” through which visitors came and went—the sit-down gave the men more free time than they’d had in years. There was plenty to do: One plant hosted basketball, boxing and wrestling matches, while in less sportive moments, men would read newspapers and magazines, including the Punch Press, the strike bulletin edited by University of Michigan students. (One plant even had a designated reading room.) There were also classes on labor history and collective bargaining; card games, checkers and chess. Strikers at Chevy No. 4 used part of the building as a roller rink and took turns with three or four pairs of skates. Sharing downtime built stronger union bonds, too.
