The Flint Sit-Down Strike: 44 Days Inside the Plant That Built the UAW

On the morning of December 30, 1936, word reached the United Auto Workers local in Flint, Michigan that General Motors was moving the dies, the massive stamping tools that shape every body panel, out of Fisher Body Plant No. 1. Empty the dies out and GM could keep building car bodies somewhere non-union while a strike in Flint accomplished nothing. UAW organizer Bob Travis called a lunchtime meeting at the union hall across the street, laid out what was happening, and sent the members back across the street. They walked in, stopped the line, and stayed. No picket signs, no walkout, hands off the machines and bodies still inside the building. Forty-four days later, on February 11, 1937, General Motors signed a one-page agreement recognizing the United Auto Workers, the first time a major American automaker had recognized an industrial union. In between, the strikers held two plants and survived a police attack that the record still calls the Battle of the Running Bulls.

Why sit down instead of walking out

A picket line left a strike exactly where an employer wanted it: outside the building. A company could hire replacements, walk them past the picket with police alongside, and keep the machines running while the union argued its case to nobody. Staying inside flipped that. GM could not run Fisher Body No. 1 without physically clearing hundreds of men out first, and clearing them out meant sending police into a building packed with machinery, glass, and stacked auto parts the company needed intact. Every assault on a sit-down risked wrecking the factory GM was fighting to keep running, the same industrial-union logic that Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union had chased four decades earlier: one union for the whole industry instead of one for each craft, a fight Debs lost and the UAW was about to win. Within days, workers held Fisher Body Plant No. 2 as well (accounts differ on which of the two plants actually sat down first that week), and two of GM’s key Flint plants sat idle with union men living inside them. Across GM’s struck operations, roughly 136,000 workers eventually went idle at 17 plants.

The Battle of the Running Bulls

Fisher Body Plant No. 2 got the harder test. On the night of January 11, 1937, plant guards tried to cut off the strikers’ food, and when the confrontation escalated, city police arrived at the gates with tear gas, buckshot, and their sidearms. For hours, strikers barricaded inside answered with the plant’s fire hoses and whatever metal was in reach: bolts, bottles, hinges, while police fired into the crowd gathered outside. By the count History.com uses, sixteen strikers and eleven police officers were hurt before it ended.

The turn came from a 23-year-old striker’s wife named Genora Johnson (later Genora Johnson Dollinger). She grabbed the loudspeaker on the union’s sound car and went after the police directly:

Cowards Cowards Shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing at the mothers of children.

Then she turned to the women in the crowd:

Break through those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts.

Some of them did, walking toward the gunfire, and the police broke off rather than fire into a crowd that now included women. The name that stuck, the Battle of the Running Bulls, mocks the outcome: bulls being period slang for police, and Bull Run being the Civil War battle where an army famously ran the other way. In the weeks after, Johnson turned the improvised defense into a standing unit, recruiting about 400 of the roughly 1,000 women already supporting the strike into the Women’s Emergency Brigade, identified by red berets and armbands marked E.B.

The governor who would not send troops in

Governor Frank Murphy, a Democrat who had campaigned as a friend of labor, answered the Battle of the Running Bulls by sending about 1,200 Michigan National Guard troops into Flint. He used them to keep city police and company guards away from the plants, not to clear the strikers out, despite pressure to intervene by force, including from the Vice President, who urged federal action against the strike. Murphy’s own Guard officers told him a forced eviction “would result in bloodshed and riot,” and he kept negotiating instead. More than a year later, defending Murphy against accusations of treason over his handling of the strike, President Roosevelt credited the governor’s restraint with saving “hundreds and even thousands of human lives.”

The courts had already tried the legal route once. In early January 1937, Genesee County Circuit Judge Edward Black issued an injunction ordering the strikers out of both Fisher plants, until a union lawyer checked the county records and found that Black personally owned 3,365 shares of General Motors stock. A judge is not supposed to rule on a case he holds stock in, and the injunction collapsed. When GM and the courts pushed a new eviction deadline in early February, the strikers still holding Fisher No. 1 wired the governor directly:

Governor, we have decided to stay in the plant. We have no illusions about the sacrifices which this decision will entail. We fully expect that if a violent effort is made to oust us many of us will be killed and we take this means of making it known to our wives, to our children, to the people of the state of Michigan and the country, that if this result follows from the attempt to eject us, you are the one who must be held responsible for our deaths

Murphy did not send troops to clear the plant.

The decoy that took Chevrolet’s engines

With Murphy shuttling between GM and a union the company still would not deal with directly, the UAW needed one more plant to force a settlement. Every Chevrolet engine GM built anywhere in the country came out of a single building, Chevrolet Plant No. 4 in Flint. Organizer Bob Travis let word leak, deliberately, at a meeting he knew included company informants, that the union planned to seize the nearby Chevrolet Plant No. 9 at 3:20 p.m. on February 1, 1937. GM believed it and threw its guards at Plant 9. While they stood watch there, unionists walked into the undefended Plant No. 4 and shut down engine production for every Chevrolet built in the country.

Forty-four days end

Ten days later, on February 11, 1937, General Motors and the UAW signed a one-page agreement. GM recognized the UAW as the exclusive bargaining agent for its members at the 17 plants that had struck, agreed not to punish anyone for having struck, and let workers discuss the union and wear union buttons on the shop floor. Within days GM raised pay: five cents an hour by History.com’s account, five percent by Wikipedia’s, a discrepancy the record keeps rather than resolves. The men who had lived inside Fisher Body No. 1 and No. 2 and Chevrolet No. 4 for as long as 44 days walked out through the gates instead of being carried out of them.

What the strike built, and what ended the tactic

The UAW counted roughly 30,000 members in October 1936. By October 1937 it counted about 400,000, part of a wider surge in American union membership that the sit-down wave touched off nationwide: nearly half a million workers took part in one at some point in 1936-37, hitting rubber plants, glass plants, and department stores along with the automakers Flint had cracked open.

The win did not make the tactic legal, and it never had been. In 1939 the Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. that occupying an employer’s property was, in Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s words, “a high-handed proceeding without shadow of legal right,” and that a company could fire sit-down strikers even when its own unfair labor practices had provoked the sit-down in the first place. Unlike a general strike, which stops work across a whole city or industry at once, the sit-down worked plant by plant, and after Fansteel it worked nowhere at all under the law. Flint got there before the courts closed the door, and the UAW it built never had to use the tactic again.