The Flint Sit-Down Strike and the Forty-Four Days That Built the UAW

The men inside Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan, had a problem on the evening of December 30, 1936. Word had spread that General Motors was preparing to move the dies, the enormous steel forms that stamped car body parts, out of the plant and to factories where the union was weak. If the dies left, a strike would be pointless; the company could simply make the parts somewhere else. So the workers did something that sounds simple and was, in the America of 1936, nearly unthinkable. They stopped working and did not leave. They sat down beside the machines, shut the gates and stayed. Workers at the smaller Fisher Body No. 2 plant across town did the same. For the next forty-four days, a few thousand autoworkers held the most powerful manufacturing company in the world at a standstill, and when they walked out on February 11, 1937, they had won something no auto union had ever won: General Motors had agreed to bargain with the United Automobile Workers.

In short: The Flint sit-down strike of 1936 and 1937 forced General Motors to recognize the UAW by occupying its plants instead of picketing outside them, which made it nearly impossible to replace the strikers or move production. A governor who refused to use troops to evict them, a well-organized community and a precise target made the difference, and the victory opened the door to mass unionization in American industry.

Why the old ways kept failing

By 1936, General Motors was the largest corporation in the country and one of the largest in the world, and it had kept unions out of its plants for decades. Autoworkers faced speedups on the assembly line, seasonal layoffs that could leave families without income for months, arbitrary firings by foremen and the constant presence of company spies. A Senate committee investigating violations of civil liberties, chaired by Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin, documented that General Motors had spent large sums on labor espionage, hiring detective agencies to infiltrate and report on union activity.

Conventional strikes had little chance against such an employer. Workers who walked out and formed picket lines outside a plant could be replaced, or the company could shift production elsewhere. Police and hired guards could break picket lines. Strikers who walked away from the job gave up their only real leverage, which was their physical presence at the machines.

The sit-down solved that problem. Workers who occupied a plant could not easily be replaced, because the replacements could not get in. The company could not move equipment, because the strikers controlled the building. And the company would be reluctant to use force, because force risked damaging its own expensive machinery. The tactic had been used in Europe, notably in France in 1936, and by rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, earlier that year. Flint brought it to the largest stage.

The organizers and the target

The Flint strike was not a spontaneous uprising, although it had spontaneous elements. It was the product of months of careful, often secret organizing by people sent by the young UAW and by the Committee for Industrial Organization, the new body John L. Lewis had launched in 1935 to organize mass-production industries.

Organizers including Wyndham Mortimer and Bob Travis worked quietly in Flint, recruiting workers one at a time and holding meetings in homes rather than in public halls, to avoid company spies. Several of the organizers were socialists or Communists, a fact that later critics would emphasize and that the strikers themselves generally did not dwell on; the people doing the work were the people willing to take the risk.

The choice of Fisher Body No. 1 was strategic. It produced body dies and components for many GM vehicles, and shutting it down, along with a plant in Cleveland that had also been struck, would choke production across the company. Strikes are often lost for lack of a precise target. This one had a very precise target.

Who the strikers were

The people who sat down in Flint were not, for the most part, veteran trade unionists. Flint had grown explosively with the auto industry, drawing workers from rural Michigan, from the South, from Appalachia and from abroad. Many were young. Many had come north for wages that were high by the standards of farms and mill towns, and had then discovered the speed of the line and the insecurity of seasonal layoffs. Their grievances were concrete: the pace of work, the arbitrary power of foremen, the knowledge that a man over forty could be let go and replaced by someone younger.

They were also, in significant ways, divided. Black workers at GM were largely confined to foundry work, janitorial jobs and other hard and low-paid positions, and the early UAW's commitment to racial equality was uneven. Some white workers held deep racial prejudices. Building an industrial union meant, over time, confronting those divisions, and the UAW's later role in the civil rights movement grew out of struggles that were only beginning in 1937.

Religious and political differences ran through the plants too. Some strikers were Catholic immigrants; others were Southern Protestants. Some were socialists; many were not political at all. What held them together during the forty-four days was not ideology but a shared and immediate problem, and an organization that gave them a way to address it.

Life inside the plant

The strikers organized the occupied plants with remarkable discipline. They formed committees to handle food, sanitation, security, entertainment and communication. They held classes and staged plays. They forbade alcohol, kept the plant clean and protected the machinery, partly to deny the company any excuse to claim property damage.

Food came from outside. A strike kitchen, staffed largely by women from the community, prepared meals and passed them through windows and gates. Families, local businesses and supporters from other cities donated supplies.

Women played a decisive role. Most of the strikers inside were men, but wives, sisters, daughters and women workers outside built the support system that made the occupation possible. Genora Johnson, the wife of a striker, helped organize the Women's Emergency Brigade, whose members wore red berets and armbands and were prepared to put themselves between police and strikers. Their presence was not decorative. It changed the calculation for any police commander considering an assault.

The Battle of the Running Bulls

On January 11, 1937, the confrontation turned violent. The company shut off the heat in Fisher Body No. 2 in the middle of a Michigan winter, and guards tried to stop food deliveries. When police arrived and fired tear gas at the plant, strikers fought back, hurling door hinges, bottles and other objects from the windows and turning the plant's fire hoses on the officers. The police eventually retreated. Strikers mockingly named the clash the Battle of the Running Bulls, using a slang term for police. Several people were injured, some by gunfire, though no one was killed.

The battle could have ended the strike. Instead, it drew national attention and led Michigan's governor, Frank Murphy, to send the National Guard to Flint. Murphy, a Democrat elected with labor's support, was the central figure in what happened next. He used the Guard to keep order, not to clear the plants. He was under heavy pressure from General Motors, from business leaders and from much of the press to enforce court orders that the strikers leave. He refused to send troops in, fearing a bloodbath, and instead pushed both sides toward negotiation.

The courts, the injunctions and the Chevrolet gambit

General Motors went to court. A local judge issued an injunction ordering the strikers out, but it emerged that the judge owned a large amount of GM stock, and the order lost its force amid the embarrassment. A second judge issued another injunction ordering the strikers to leave by a deadline in early February, with heavy penalties if they did not.

Meanwhile, the strikers decided to escalate. On February 1, the union staged a diversion at one Chevrolet plant while its real target, Chevrolet Plant No. 4, which made engines, was seized by strikers. The Chevrolet complex was central to GM's production. With engine production stopped as well, the company's position weakened sharply.

As the injunction deadline approached, the strikers made clear they would not leave. Murphy still refused to use the Guard to remove them. Lewis came to Detroit and negotiated directly with GM executives, with Murphy as an intermediary and President Franklin Roosevelt's administration pressing for a settlement.

What the agreement said, and why it mattered

The agreement signed on February 11, 1937, was short. General Motors recognized the UAW as the bargaining agent for its members, though not as the exclusive representative of all workers, and agreed not to retaliate against strikers. It was a limited win on paper.

In practice, it changed everything. Recognition by GM, the hardest target in the industry, broke the dam. UAW membership grew rapidly. Within weeks, sit-downs spread to other industries and cities. In March 1937, United States Steel agreed to recognize the steelworkers' organizing committee without a strike, partly because its leaders saw what had happened at GM. Chrysler workers staged their own sit-down that spring and won recognition. Ford held out until 1941.

The legal status of the sit-down was always shaky. In 1939, in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., the Supreme Court held that employers could fire workers who engaged in sit-down strikes, because seizing an employer's property was not protected activity. The tactic largely disappeared from American labor after that. Its legacy did not.

The fair objection, and the answer

The sit-down was, by any reasonable reading, an occupation of private property, and the strikers defied court orders. Opponents at the time argued that tolerating it would invite lawlessness and encourage people to seize property whenever they had a grievance. That argument deserves a straight answer.

Here is ours. The strikers broke the law, and they knew it. They also faced a company that had spent heavily to spy on them, a legal system in which labor rights were new and barely enforced, and a set of choices in which ordinary picket lines had failed again and again. The Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act only in April 1937, two months after the strike ended. The question was not whether the sit-down was lawful but whether workers had any lawful path to a voice at work. In 1936, for most of them, they did not.

That does not make every occupation justified. It means the Flint strike should be judged in its context, by people who know what happened when workers asked politely.

The town after the strike

Flint's later history is harder to tell. The city remained a General Motors town for decades, and the UAW members who won in 1937 and their children built a middle-class life there. As GM closed plants and cut jobs from the 1980s onward, Flint lost much of its population and its tax base. In 2014 the city's water source was switched to the Flint River under a state-appointed emergency manager, and the failure to treat the water properly exposed residents to lead, a public health disaster that drew national attention and long legal battles.

The two Flint stories, the triumph of 1937 and the water crisis that began in 2014, are connected by more than geography. One shows what organized people can win. The other shows what happens to a community when the institutions that once gave it power, the union, the employer and a functioning local government, have been hollowed out.

What it says to workers now

The forty-four days in Flint offer lessons that apply well beyond the auto industry.

Choose a target that matters. The Flint strikers did not try to shut down everything; they shut down the parts that the rest of the system depended on.

Build the community around the workplace. The strike survived because families, neighbours and supporters fed and protected the strikers. Labor fights that remain inside the workplace are easier to isolate.

Elected officials matter. Murphy's refusal to clear the plants with troops was a political choice. A different governor could have ended the strike with force. Who holds office, and what they believe, can decide a labor dispute. That was true in 1937, and it remains true in 2026, with a new Congress about to be seated and the National Labor Relations Board's future in question.

What you can do

The workers in Flint had few legal protections and a great deal of courage. You can help today's workers with less of the latter required.

• Follow organizing drives as they happen. The labor page lists the newest union elections counted by the National Labor Relations Board, along with union membership over time. Look for drives in manufacturing and logistics, where Flint's lessons apply most directly.
• Support the community side of a fight. Strike kitchens, food banks and family support networks are still what keeps long disputes alive. Find local groups by state on the organizations page.
• Know who holds the power to intervene. Governors, state attorneys general and members of Congress all shape how labor disputes end. Use the representatives lookup to find yours and their contact information.
• Keep the history close. Collections of coverage on labor history and current fights are gathered on the workers and unions topic page.