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trying to make. On January 29th, 1936, over 2500 Firestone workers struck,
aided by the CIO, and the bosses retreated and gave in to their demands in
days. Within 3 months, 19 sit-downs took place in the Akron area and then
they spread to Michigan. Labor had found an effective new weapon to use—
staying inside the factory to stop production and keep scabs away. By the end
of the year, the sit-down strike would forever change the course of labor his-
tory.
As workers in Akron and elsewhere sat down, labor at the Remington
Rand Typewriter factory, organized by the AFL, took a more traditional
approach. After a long struggle to unionize, Remington Rand began to
spread rumors that it was going to sell the company to a firm that would dis-
solve the union, and also that it had purchased a new site so it might close
the union plants already in operation. The company president, James Rand,
then made tensions increased when he published an article explaining the
“Mohawk Valley Formula”—a process whereby the employers would break
strikes and unions by intimidating workers, calling out police, fortifying plants
with military weapons, employing scabs, and threatening to close the factories
to get rid of the unions. The National Association of Manufacturers widely
shared the article and corporations began to prepare for more class war. In
fact, just one plant, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, had 8 machine
guns, 369 rifles, 190 shotguns, and 450 revolvers with over 10,000 rounds of
ammunition, as well as 109 gas guns with 3000 rounds of gas ammunition.
The Mohawk Valley formula was not original—as Haymarket, Homestead,
Ludlow and so many other places had shown—but it had been shelved over
the past decades of “industrial harmony.” Now the bosses were threatening
violence once more, and the NLRB called the formula a “battle plan for
industrial war.” In a huge report on the Rand situation, over 120 pages long,
the NLRB forced the company to recognize the union and make restitution
to the workers, while the LaFollette Committee was putting pressure on com-
panies, like Youngstown Sheet and Tube, to disband their private armies.
These events were the opening act to the greatest labor struggles of the
century, taking place in late 1936 and early 1937 at plants across the country,
but especially in Flint, Michigan. Labor was energized by the 1936 elections,
the NLRB, and the creation of the CIO and decided it was time to unionize
millions of workers in the mass industries like automobiles, steel, rubber, elec-
tricity, and others. In fact, the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee [SWOC],