Back in 1936, workers at GM’s plants in Flint, Michigan had it rough. They were subject to constant speedups in production, taking a toll on their bodies and spirits. Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! contains the observations of a GM worker’s wife, who said of her husband, “You should see him come home at night, him and the rest of the men in the buses, so tired like they was dead.” Another said her husband, who was thirty, looked like he was fifty, so grueling was his job.
The average worker was taking home about $900, about half of what the the federal government determined was necessary to provide for a family of four that year. Rather than pay their workers adequate wages, GM spent money on detectives hired to spy on workers and root out union organizers. The company also conscripted the Black Legion — a right-wing vigilante group that had broken from the KKK and counted as its enemies Jews, Catholics, blacks, and labor unions — to intimidate troublemaking workers. (This wasn’t GM’s only tie to fascists: in 1935, it supplied the Third Reich with military vehicles.)
The newly minted UAW took note of the dissatisfaction in Flint, and seized the opportunity and began organizing workers into the union. After news spread of victorious strikes at rubber plants in Akron, Ohio, small work stoppages began to take place in the Flint plants. Workers took action at Fisher Plant No. 1 seven times in one week in late 1936, for example by leaving an hour early in protest. In November, management fired two brothers, the Perkins boys, and expected others to pick up the slack. It was like holding a match to a powder keg.
Word started to go around as the workers arrived for their shift, notes Brecher. “The Perkins boys were fired! Nobody starts working!” When the foreman blew the whistle and the machines began to whir, the workers stood still. Mayhem erupted on the shop floor as management scrambled to get workers to comply.
Eventually managers issued a call over the local radio requesting that the Perkins boys come back in. They were rehired. Bud Simons, a union leader in the plant, told the others, “Fellow, you’ve seen what you can get by sticking together.” The Flint membership of UAW grew tenfold in two weeks as a response to this victory, from 150 to 1,500.
The union, now on solid footing, requested a collective bargaining process with GM. But that would take a while. For their part, workers were tired of being pushed around and inspired by the prospect of winning real victories through strike action. In December, in Flint’s Fisher Plant No. 2, management ordered three workers to quit the union. Fifty workers stopped working in protest.