FDR, New Deals, and the Limits of Power 217textiles workers, branded “Communist” by many employers, were afraid to
join unions because of the threat of retaliation from the bosses. Finally, the
union called off the strikes when Roosevelt promised government mediation.
For the men and women who had been out of work for months and suffered
in violent confrontations with police and Guardsmen, there was a great disil-
lusionment with both the New Deal and their own union leaders for accept-
ing mediation.
Overall, labor’s aggressive confrontations with the employers throughout
1934 paid dividends. The strikes stopped production, caused tens of millions
of dollars in damages, and alarmed a ruling class which already feared radical,
Socialist, anarchist, or other “militant” labor movements. The various class
struggles of 1934 were like a siren to the Capitalists who preferred “stability”
and “harmony” to violence. Consequently, as seen in the previous section,
Senator Wagner finally got a bill passed to give workers the right to organize
unions and have them established as labor’s bargaining agent. Worker activism
in the streets, much more than any liberal politics, created the motivation for
the Wagner Act, and union membership grew accordingly. The Wagner Act
and the NLRB, however politically crucial to labor they were, had little impact
at first. Employers just ignored it and even New Deal Democrats did little to
defend union rights. So the direct action of workers confronting bosses, if
anything, increased. Following their traditional pattern, employers simply
ignored the law, continued to harass union activists, refused to negotiate with
labor representatives, and denied requests for wage increases. Wagner Act
notwithstanding, the class conflict between employers and workers returned
to the streets, and 1936-1937 were turbulent years.
In November 1935, barely a few months after the Wagner Act became law,
rubber workers at the Goodyear truck tire department devised a new tactic
for strikes, one that would define future labor struggles—the sit-down strike.
The idea actually came from baseball team that had been unionized and
refused to play in a game with a non-union umpire. In the industrial world,
rather than refuse to enter the plant and set up pickets on the outside, work-
ers inside the plant sat down on the job, refusing to work so that no goods
were made and scabs could not be brought in to resume production. Goodyear
had announced a plan to cut pay, lay off workers, and increase the pace of the
factory line, so the workers just stayed in the plant and did no work. The first
sit-down did not even last a day, and management restored pay cuts it was