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

Luke Savage - Author, The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History

March 2026



Workers wave proudly from the windows of a plant closed by the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, in 1937. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University


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.



Crowds hail strikers at Fisher No. 1. Some supporters brought meals in giant kettles and huge milk cans; workers often hoisted the food up through windows. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

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.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/organized-labor-took-huge-step-forward-when-GM-workers-sat-down-unison-1937-180988089/