Standard Cotton Products and the General Motors Sit-down Strike: Some "Forgotten Men" Remembered

Abstract

Early in morning of 30 December 1936, a group of automobile body workers sat down in Fisher Body plant No. 2 in Flint, Michigan, idling a thousand workers and stopping daily production of 450 Chevrolet bodies. Later that day, workers similarly occupied large Fisher Body plant No. 1, a facility which employed seven thousand men and women and produced fourteen hundred Buick bodies a day.1 These were some of opening events in a drive launched by newly-formed United Automobile Workers union to organize General Motors Corporation and ultimately entire auto industry. The ensuing strike was to last forty-four days. It would spread in and beyond Flint to involve 136,000 people in fifty GM plants across nation, and it would culminate in an agreement with that massive company that would be characterized a day after settlement as the first major offensive won [by Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO] in their program of unionizing nation's basic industries.2 In same story that reported outbreak of strikes at Fisher Nos. 1 and 2, local paper, The Flint Journal, also reported that during afternoon of 30 December, workers in a small plant known as Standard Cotton Products Company also sat down following demands for a 20 percent wage increase, a minimum of fifty cents an hour, and an eight-hour day.3