220 ChaPter^4
if they let you take it. There were no breaks in an eight- or 10-hour day and
half a day on Saturday,” the mill hand added. “If you wanted to get a drink
of water or go to the bathroom, there were no relief people to cover for you.
A lot of workers would soil or wet themselves.” As a result, hundreds of
workers would die from the heat amid such conditions. On December 30th,
1936, all that was about to change.
At 8 p.m. that night over 2000 workers in the GM Fisher Body Plant #1
in Flint sat down and refused to leave the factory. Like the strikers in other
cities in the Fall of 1936, they wanted the UAW recognized as their union and
bargaining agent, higher wages, a grievance system to judge illegal actions by
employers, an end to GM sending work out to non-union plants, and safety
measures to protect the assembly line workers from injury. Alfred Sloan, GM’s
president, immediately announced that he would not even negotiate with the
workers until they left the plant; they refused. The workers had a huge advan-
tage in this action—they controlled the means of production, so no cars were
being manufactured. They also had significant local support, and the families
of the strikers and owners of local diners sent in food to the protestors, despite
the efforts of Sloan and others to prevent that. GM even got a local judge to
issue an injunction against delivering food to the strikers, but it was revealed
that he owned $200,000 in GM stock, so he was disqualified from the case.
Sloan then decided to play hardball and had the heat in the plants shut off,
but the workers wrapped themselves in coats and blankets and refused to
leave. On January 11th, local police tried to cut off the food deliveries to the
plant, but UAW supporters outside fought back in the “Battle of the Running
Bulls,” in which 16 workers and 11 police were injured. The food got through
and the UAW then took over the Fisher Body #2 plant next to #1. When
security forces again tried to rush the plant, the wives and children of the
workers inside stood in front of the Guardsmen, basically daring them to
attack women and kids. They backed down. On February 1st, the union took
control of the huge Chevrolet #4 engine factory. GM’s output, usually about
50,000 cars a month, went down to just 150 in February. CIO President Lewis
appealed to FDR to intervene on behalf of the GM strikers, given their sup-
port of his 1936 re-election, but FDR, and the governor of Michigan, refused
to take sides and reprimanded Lewis for his request for federal intervention.
Still, neither the president nor state officials, contrary to virtually every indus-
trial strike to that point, did not send in troops to break the strike, a key ele-