Organized Labor Took a Huge Step Forward When GM Workers Sat Down in Unison in 1937

From G.M.’s point of view, the sit-downers were illegally trespassing, plain and simple. In this spirit, the company duly secured an injunction from State Circuit Judge Edward D. Black for their removal. But Murphy refused to enforce it. When G.M. escalated by cutting off the heat at Fisher No. 2 on January 11, the governor responded by making his most consequential and fateful intervention in the strike: Murphy demanded that the company restore heat in the plants and ordered Michigan’s Welfare Department to provide direct food aid to the striking workers. And while Murphy played the role of neutral mediator in public, he effectively sided with the union by deploying the National Guard as a buffer, privately telling UAW organizer Robert Travis and CIO leader John L. Lewis that the troops would protect the strikers inside and outside the plants and prevent their ejection. Even by the pro-labor standards of the New Deal era, Murphy’s conduct during the strike made him an outlier among Democratic governors. 

With sit-downs protected, the union was soon able to go on the offensive with a daring feint. On February 1, workers at Flint’s relatively insignificant Chevrolet No. 9 facility launched a mock sit-down action that lured G.M. guards to converge on the scene, enabling other workers to blockade themselves inside the more strategically valuable Chevrolet No. 4, which made engines for Chevrolets. “We have the key plant of the G.M., and the eyes of the world are looking at us,” one worker who participated in the action wrote in a letter to his wife. “We shure [sic] done a thing that G.M. said never could be done.” Served with a new court injunction ordering them to leave the occupied plants, the workers held their ground and, on the morning of February 3, their ranks swelled, as fellow UAW members and other supporters came in from Detroit and Toledo in a mass gesture of solidarity. By the afternoon, some 3,000 picketers had assembled outside Fisher No. 1, as other strikers occupied Flint’s main arterial road and paraded through its downtown. Amid this show of strength, G.M. soon had no choice but to yield. 

On February 11—having produced a mere 151 cars in the United States since February 1—the company capitulated and officially pledged to recognize the UAW in a signing ceremony presided over by Murphy himself. Victorious workers streamed out of their factories and formed a triumphant procession. “They marched and they sang and they danced all night long in the streets of the City of Flint,” organizer Genora Johnson Dollinger recalled in a 1976 documentary. “Buick workers and A.C. workers [from a nearby G.M. spark plug plant]—these plants weren’t even on strike—came down and they celebrated with us.” Murphy, though, was defeated in his bid for re-election as governor in 1938—in part because of a backlash from pro--business forces following his intercession in the strike. He would go on to serve as U.S. attorney general and sit on the Supreme Court.