Abstract
On December 30, 1936, General Motors (gm) workers in Flint, Michigan, sat down at their jobs. They stayed in the plants until a settlement was reached on February 11, 1937. The forty-four day strike was a victory for the United Auto Workers (uaw), a new industrial union that won the right to organize and represent employees of the largest auto company and one of the largest private employers in the United States. The gm sit-down strike had enormous significance for the history of labor, business, and the state. It also marked a turning point in uaw history and the history of working people in modern America. This Web site is part of Historical Voices, an online digital library of twentieth-century American spoken word collections. The Flint Sit-Down Strike site is more an electronic essay than an archive of interviews. The site's creators digitized the tapes of a quarter of the more than two hundred interviews conducted between 1978 and 1984 with people who were involved with the strike. Several interactive formats allow the viewer to hear excerpts from those interviews. Three “audio essays” consider the strike's organization, the strike itself, and its aftermath on pages that provide historical narrative and analysis interspersed with audio clips of interviews with participants and observers. The clips launch from text links of the interviewees' names and appear in a pop-up window where the clip streams and the text of the clip and a note identifying the speaker and the date of the interview appear. The interview excerpts vary in length from thirty seconds to ten minutes. In all, one hundred audio clips from interviews with fifty people are accessible on the site. Other interactive formats on the site include a timeline, a strike map, and three slide shows.
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