Sitdown strike
[1] By taking control of their workplaces, workers engaged in a sit-down demonstrate their power, build solidarity among themselves, prevent the deployment of strikebreakers or removal of industrial equipment, and cause cascading effects on the chain of production within and between factories.
A wave of sit-down strikes in France in May to August 1936 demanded and won union recognition and industry-wide negotiations on wages and benefits, and coincided with state guarantees of limited hours, vacation pay, and other social reforms.
Author Louis Adamic, in his account of the late 1930s wave of sit-down strikes in the United States wrote the following definition in the fall of 1936: SITDOWN, n. Act of quitting work in one or a few departments of a delicately organized mass-production factory with the aim of stopping operations in the entire or most of the plant; specif.
[7] In factories built around assembly lines, sit-down strikes enabled small numbers of workers to interrupt production across an entire plant.
[18] Workers staged strikes that occupied mines in Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Spain, France, England, and Wales from 1934 to 1936.
[13] A major sitdown strike occurred on March 22, 1936 at Krakow's Semperit rubber works, during which violence claimed the lives of six people.
As a tool for industry and even nationwide unionization, Torigian concludes, sit-down strikes "took on a significance, a character, and an effect quite unlike anything that had previously occurred.
[32] In early 1936, a series of smaller, brief sit-down strikes from at Firestone, Goodyear, and Goodrich from January 28 through February 14 presaged a larger conflict.
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.
By January 25, strikes and the effects of production shutdowns idled 150,000 workers at fifty General Motors plants from California to New York.
The UAW also justified the sit-down strike as a reasonable response to the employer's failure to bargain collectively and refrain from unfair labor practices as directed by the NLRA.
General Motors, joined in this opinion by the American Civil Liberties Union, held that the sit-down strike constituted an illegal trespass.
[40] Historian Sidney Fine wrote, "Since the sit-downers were pursuing objectives sanctioned by law but denied them by their employer, their unconventional behavior was tolerated by large sections of the public.
The National Labor Relations Board also ordered employers to reinstate workers fired for sit-down striking until this power was removed by the Supreme Court.
[42] The 1939 Supreme Court ruling in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. affirmed that sit-down strikes were illegal and held that strikers had no recourse if they were fired in retaliation.
In the 1941 case Southern Steamship Co. v. NLRB, the Supreme Court held that sailors who went on strike aboard ship were guilty of mutiny and could not claim protection of labor law.
[45] In December 2008, workers at a Republic Windows and Doors warehouse in Chicago responded to their firing amid the company declaring bankruptcy by initiating a sit-down strike occupying the worksite.
First, a conventional general strike in February built an alliance among left political forces and trade unions, which led to Popular Front electoral victory in the elections of April and May 1936.
[49] Sitdown strikes won concessions from employers in mid-May in Le Havre, Toulouse, and Paris, proving the tactic's effectiveness in French industry.
[54] 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 which produced Triumphs until their closure in 1983.
[55] 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.
Sidney Fine cites the protest form as being echoed and replicated in both the lunch counter sit-ins of the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and in the university occupations of the 1960s.
