Sitdown strike

A sit-down strike is a labour strike and a form of civil disobedience in which an organized group of workers, usually employed at factories or other centralized locations, take unauthorized or illegal possession of the workplace by "sitting down" at their stations.[1]

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The attraction of the tactic is that it prevents employers from replacing them with strikebreakers or removing equipment to transfer production to other locations. Neal Ascherson has commented that an additional attraction is that it emphasizes the role of workers in providing for the people and allows workers to in effect hold valuable machinery hostage as a bargaining chip.[2]

History

A few sit-down strikes happened in the United States before 1936. Pittsburgh steelworkers occupied a mill in 1842. In 1884, brewery workers in Cincinnati barricaded themselves for three days. New York City laundry workers sat down in 1896 in support of a garment workers’ strike. The Industrial Workers of the World were involved in the most prominent early sit-down in the United States—at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, in 1906. Workers in Minnesota sat down for three days at the Hormel Packing Corporation in 1933.[3]

Rubber workers struck five different rubber companies over the course of several months in 1936 in Akron, Ohio. The workers at the largest factory, Goodyear invented a new tactic—the sitdown strike whereby the strikers seize the plant, stop production, and keep strikebreakers out. Goodyear gave up, and recognized the United Rubber Workers (URW). It was a major victory for the labor movement, established the United Rubber Workers as the dominant union in the rubber industry, and provided a new tactic for future labor struggles.[4] In early 1937 the United Auto Workers staged successful sit-down strikes, most famously in the Flint sit-down strike that led GM to recognize the autoworkers union. In Flint, Michigan, strikers occupied several General Motors plants for more than forty days, and repelled the efforts of the police and National Guard to retake them. A wave of sit-down strikes followed but diminished by the end of the decade as the courts and the National Labor Relations Board held that sit-down strikes were illegal and sit-down strikers could be fired (see the 1939 Supreme Court ruling in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp.). While some sit-down strikes still occur in the United States, they tend to be spontaneous and short-lived.

In France, workers engaged in a number of factory occupations in the wake of the French student revolt in May 1968. At one point, more than twenty-five percent of French workers were on strike, many of them occupying their factories.

In 1973, the workers at the Triumph Motorcycles factory at Meriden, West Midlands, England, locked the new owners, NVT, out following the announcement of their plan to close Meriden.[5] The sit-in lasted over a year until the British government intervened, the result of which was the formation of the Meriden Motorcycle Co-operative[5] which produced Triumphs until their closure in 1983.

The sit-down strike was the inspiration for the sit-in, where an organized group of protesters would occupy an area in which they are not wanted by sitting and refuse to leave until their demands are met.

See also

References
  1. See Rachel Meyer, "The Rise and Fall of the Sit-Down Strike" in Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, eds. The encyclopedia of strikes in American history (ME Sharpe, 2009), pp. 204–215.
  2. Ascherson 1983.
  3. l Meyer, "The Rise and Fall of the Sit-Down Strike" p. 205.
  4. Daniel Nelson, "Origins of the sit‐down era: Worker militancy and innovation in the rubber industry, 1934–38." Labor History 23.2 (1982): 198-225. https://doi.org/10.
  5. Brooke 2002, p. 148.

Bibliography
  • Ascherson, Neal (1983). What Has Happened in Poland?.
  • Brooke, Lindsay (2002). Triumph: A Century of Passion and Power. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Motorbooks. ISBN 978-0-7603-0456-3.
  • Dubofsky, Melvyn (2000). McCartin, Joseph Anthony (ed.). We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (abridged ed.). Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-02595-2.
  • Fine, Sidney. Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (University of Michigan Press, 1969) online.
  • McGerr, Michael (2010). A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781439136034.
  • Meyer, Rachel. "The Rise and Fall of the Sit-Down Strike" in Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, eds. The encyclopedia of strikes in American history (ME Sharpe, 2009), pp. 204–215.
  • Nelson, Daniel. "Origins of the sit‐down era: Worker militancy and innovation in the rubber industry, 1934–38." Labor History 23.2 (1982): 198–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/00236568208584653
  • Torigian, Michael. "The occupation of the factories: Paris 1936, Flint 1937." Comparative Studies in Society and History 41.2 (1999): 324–347. online
  • Watson, Bruce (2005). Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-03397-3.

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