Sit-Down Strikes

SIT-DOWN STRIKES. Workers remain in their workplace in sit-down strikes, which are also known as sit-in or stay-in strikes. They can range from a quick strike in a single department while a particular grievance is negotiated with management to plant-wide, company-wide, and even nationwide occupation of factories, offices, and stores. An example of the latter was the French general strike of 1968, in which ten million French workers occupied virtually all the factories of France and came close to bringing down the de Gaulle government.

Examples of sit-down strikes can be found in preindustrial societies, although they are rare. Some occurred in the nineteenth century, with the first reported in the United States among brewery workers in Cincinnati in 1884. Major factory occupations took place in Italy just after World War I. Sit-down strikes reached their peak, however, in the 1930s. The first major one to give the technique prominence was at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, in February and March of 1936, part of the organizing drive of the then-new Congress of Industrial Organizations. In May and June of 1936 there were major sit-down strikes in France following the election of a People’s Front coalition government. French unions were not involved in these strikes until well after they had begun, and the French Communist Party tried to prevent them to avoid damaging the People’s Front government. In December 1936 and well into the winter of 1937, the most influential of these strikes in the United States took place at a series of General Motors facilities, centering in Flint, Michigan. This strike achieved the recognition of the United Auto Workers as bargaining agent for General Motors workers and set the pattern for a wave of sit-down strikes all over the United States in factories, offices, stores, and other settings.

There is a significant element of spontaneity in sit-down strikes because union leaders tend to be very uneasy about the inherent challenge to private property contained in the taking over of production facilities and, while they may be forced to support such strikes, rarely initiate them. Local union leaders, however, may be very much involved in organizing and sustaining such strikes.

Sit-down strikes have the advantage to workers of preventing scabbing or the continuing of normal or partial operation by employers; they offer protection from attack by police forces or vigilantes; and they hold the property of employers hostage in negotiations over demands or grievances. They are usually illegal, and in the United States, after the wave of sit-down strikes in the 1930s, were made illegal everywhere by direct statute. Nonetheless, sit-down strikes have continued to occur on occasion. In 1952, members of the Farm Equipment Workers staged a sit-down at an International Harvester plant in Chicago, to protest the company’s plan to shut down the facility. The sitdowners were forcibly ejected and the plant was closed the following year. More successful were the sit-downs that occurred in Chicago by members of the United Electrical Workers at the Republic Window and Door Company in 2009 and 2012; their actions prevented the company from shutting down and resulted in the formation of a worker cooperative which now operates the factory.

There are possible extensions of the sit-down strike that can lead to further challenges to existing societies. In Japan, at the end of World War II, Tokyo bus drivers went on strike by staying on their jobs and running the buses. They simply did not collect fares, thus not alienating the bus-riding public. At the other extreme, the workers of Hungary in 1956 occupied the factories and took over their management through workers’ councils, achieving the beginning of a social revolution. It would seem that sit-down strikes offer too many advantages to workers to disappear entirely from the arsenal of working-class weapons.

Fine, Sidney. Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.