Wyndham Mortimer hadn’t even had time to put down his suitcases when the phone rang in his hotel room. “You better go back the way you came if you don’t want to come back in a wooden box,” he said a voice before hanging up. A welcome on par with what someone who had arrived in the world capital of the all-powerful General Motors to try to create a union could expect in 1936.
In Flint, near Detroit, four out of every five residents lived directly or indirectly from General Motors. And yet, in that summer of 1936, only 0.3% of the 47,000 workers that the company had in the city were part of the automobile workers’ union, UAW. A lack of union enthusiasm that had many reasons, but that was certainly not due to them being satisfied with their working conditions.
“They don’t let you drink water”, “We breathe gases that make people sick”, “I can’t even go to the toilet”, “In the same day they hire 100 workers and fire another 100″… The testimonies of that moment They make it clear, but in the midst of the Great Depression, unskilled workers had few alternatives other than unemployment. Furthermore, the company had made it clear that “it would never negotiate with a union,” and it did everything possible to ensure that one did not exist.
The threatening message that Wyndham Mortimer had received upon his arrival in Flint probably came from the “Black Legion,” a group close to the Ku Klux Klan and sponsored by General Motors that used violence against anyone who wanted to form a union. In addition, the company annually spent the equivalent of seven million euros today to hire up to fourteen detective agencies that investigated its workers to fire the “rebels.”
This strategy had allowed General Motors not to share with its staff the spectacular profits it was reaping at that time. At the onset of the Great Depression, the company had lowered prices and laid off thousands of workers, rehiring many of them soon after under worse conditions. By 1936 it was already the largest industrial company in the country and sold one and a half million cars a year, including almost half of all those purchased in the United States.
But everything was about to change. In just six months of work on the ground, the UAW automobile workers union in Flint went from 150 to 4,500 members. At the end of the year they began to test their strength with small strikes in a factory and managed to reinstate three workers who had been fired. One of the union leaders then told his people: “You have already seen what you can achieve if you stay united, all I want is for you to remember that.” Everything was ready for “the strike that was heard around the world” to begin.
On December 30, 1936, the crisis suddenly accelerated. General Motors executives, realizing what was happening, had ordered some of the key machinery removed and put on several trains to take to other factories to maintain production in the event of a strike. When Robert Travis, the UAW boss at the plant, told workers on their lunch break, a crowd responded by chanting “let’s close the factory!”
They were very clear about how to do it. In the US, the strikers’ traditional tactic had been to rally around their factory and block access. However, this type of protest had often ended with the intervention of the police or the army to clear the masses, or with the employer hiring thugs to break up the picket and bring new workers into the plant to replace them. to the strikers.
UAW officials in Flint knew that the strikers would be safer in their normal jobs, but doing nothing. This would ensure that no one replaced them. They also believed that in this way General Motors would not forcibly evict the interior of the factory, since violence could damage the very expensive machines on the assembly line. Within minutes, a worker leaned out of a third-floor window of Flint’s main auto factory and shouted, “It’s ours, it’s ours!”
An occupation that was to last 44 days and that the union had carefully planned had just begun. From the beginning, rules were established: no alcohol, no weapons, and vandalism was strictly prohibited. The strikers spent hours playing cards or ping-pong, reading or attending talks organized by the union. They also, in the long run, convinced artists to come and perform inside the factory.
The strikers then numbered a few hundred and they knew that this type of protests, in the US, usually ended badly for the workers. They did, however, have the Wagner Law, a law enacted a little over a year ago that established the right of employees to form a union without suffering retaliation and obliged companies to negotiate with these unions. However, companies such as Ford, Chrysler and General Motors itself openly refused to comply with the new law in the hope that the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional.
The Flint strike was his first big test. The president of General Motors, Alfred Sloan, had made it very clear that he was not even going to talk to the strikers, much less recognize their union. The company’s official position was that working conditions were decided by the managers of each factory and there was nothing to discuss. General Motors was already preparing its next move, which had nothing to do with the dialogue.
Although the winds of change were blowing from Washington, in Flint the power of General Motors was practically absolute. The mayor and most of the councilors were employees and former employees of the company, as was the local police chief, who had always intervened in labor disputes on the company’s side.
After thirteen days of strike, on January 11, at eight degrees below zero, General Motors cut off the plant’s heating. He also sent a group of security guards to prevent the strikers’ families from bringing them food. The confrontation between them gave the company the excuse it was looking for to demand the presence of the Flint police, and thirty officers arrived throwing smoke canisters to disperse those who were gathered outside the factory, but they also launched canisters. inside the plant.
Fearing immediate eviction, the strikers threw bottles, rocks and car parts out of the windows, and shot water from hoses from the roof. The police responded with live fire and injured thirteen people. The incident led the state’s new governor to visit the city and send a contingent of 1,200 soldiers to ensure security. Unlike previous occasions, he specifically told them that his mission was not to suppress the protest.
“The Battle of the Running Bulls” had taken place before the eyes of some 3,000 people and, according to the UAW union, convinced many in Flint of the need to support the strikers. It also caused the protest against General Motors to spread to other factories in the city and to other plants in the state of Michigan and the United States. In the area near Detroit alone, within a few days 87 strikes had been declared and 17 factories The company was stopped.
General Motors was running out of options and had lost the battle of public opinion. Even when he managed to get a judge to authorize the expulsion of the strikers for illegally occupying the first factory, 10,000 people surrounded the plant to prevent it. The state governor refused to use the army to expel them and President Roosevelt himself said that he did not want an eviction. Instead he asked General Motors to negotiate with its workers. By then, the strikers only had one request: that the company recognize the UAW as their representative.
Managers did not have many other options. After 44 days of occupation in Flint, they had 136,000 workers on strike across the country and their company had stopped manufacturing 280,000 cars. On February 11, 1937, General Motors officially recognized the UAW as a union representative and committed to a wage increase equivalent to more than half a billion euros today. He also assured that there would be no reprisals against the strikers.
The victory was not limited to Flint: in less than a year, wages at General Motors had risen 300% and a frightened Ford and Chrysler announced that they would also admit collective bargaining with workers’ representatives. In one year, the UAW automobile workers union went from 30,000 members to half a million, and salaries rose 300%. If before the strike their constituents earned half of what an average family needed to live, after it they fully joined the middle class.
The success of the revolt did not only affect the automobile sector. Unions, which had just over three million members in the US in 1930, reached 10 million in 1942.
The Flint strike forever changed the history of industry in the country and inspired millions of workers in their own struggles, although it also provoked an anti-union backlash that led to the repeal of much of the Wagner Act in the 1940s. There began a slow decline of unions in the country that lasts to this day.
