Love (and solidarity) in the time of political puffery

As the UAW strikes, it is high time to remember the lesson of the most effective labor action in American history

Members of the Flint Emergency Women’s Brigade celebrating the successful conclusion of the 1937 Sit-Down strike

Top notes:

This essay is indebted to an absolute classic piece of social movement scholarship, Sit-Down by Sidney Fine. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Speaking of reading and learning, there has already been some terrific writing about the current UAW strike. Labor Notes has been terrific, of course (please read this piece about how to support the strike),

Joshua P. Hill

has already put out a couple of incredible pieces, and I also loved this context-building essay from Alex Press.

Finally, I talk a lot here about the importance of both giving and receiving support. I try to model both ends of that equation in this space. As always, if there’s anything I can do to help you or your work, don't be a stranger. In the meantime, what honestly helps me the most (besides just knowing you’re here) is support for my writing, which you can do by either sharing this piece, becoming a paid subscriber and/or pre-ordering The Right Kind of White (and then signing up for a nice thank you gift).

I certainly hope you’ve already heard the good news, but it is worth repeating. The United Auto Workers are on strike! Against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis simultaneously! In three different locations, and with more to come!

There have already been a number of pieces written about why “this strike is different,” none of them hyperbolic. This strike is different: both in how it came about (this action only exists because of a multi-year organizing campaign within the union), its philosophical and strategic aims (the UAW is fighting not just for a fair contract, but also to help catalyze a broader multi-racial working class movement) and its tactics (this is a “stand-up” strike, where strategically chosen locals across the country are intermittently called on and off of the picket line in order to keep the Big Three from developing strike-breaking contingency plans).

This is a new era for the UAW, which is why it is notable that when they officially announced the strike, they did so not by hailing a break with the past, but instead deliberately harkening back to it.

For example, what do you notice about this video?

This is the UAW’s official kickoff message. It starts as you’d expect. There’s Shaun Fain, the UAW President, surrounded by vintage labor posters. He’s reminding the viewer that “everything working people have won, we’ve won together” which is very true, but is also the sort of thing union leaders always say. There’s some predictable b-roll of a diverse group of autoworkers staring determinedly at the camera. You’ve seen videos like this before— a White guy boss makes his case for some new policy or platform, meanwhile the rank and file are seen but not heard. You expect the rest of the video to focus on the rationale for the strike itself, about how workers are being left behind while the Big Three rakes in record profits. And Fain does get there, eventually.

But first, he talks at length about what went down in Flint, Michigan in the winter of 1936 and 1937.

If you’ve heard about the Flint sit-down strike, it was either because you sat through a dry high school history lesson or a dewy-eyed leftist elegy about a now-distant golden age when organized labor was ascendent. The implication of nostalgic stories about Flint is that it was once possible for workers to occupy a factory for three months, but that was then. You know, back before deindustrialization, globalization and the hollowing out of towns like Flint, back before the Southern Strategy of Nixon begot the Everywhere Strategy of Reagan and Trump, back before the White working class was turned (for the hundredth time) against the Black and Brown working class, back before the percentage of the private sector that is unionized dropped to a paltry 6%.

We’re told that couldn’t happen today, that too much has changed.

The thing is, the Flint autoworkers who occupied their city’s Fisher body plants in 1936 weren’t actually riding a triumphant wave. Not only were they organizing in the throes of they Great Depression, but they were battling an epidemic of robber baron-fueled hopelessness and isolation that would feel patently familiar to so many workers today.

Back in the 1903s, the relatively young auto industry had not yet been successfully unionized. Many analysts wondered if it would ever be. Most of the new migrants (both ethnic Whites and Blacks) who streamed to the Upper Midwest to work at the hulking new auto plants didn’t come from union backgrounds. Once settled in, their new employers (in a stance that would be directly copied by the Starbucks and Amazons of today), sold themselves not just as bosses but as benevolent benefactors. Companies like Ford and GM offered workers the chance to live in company houses, bowl at company lanes and swim in company pools. The company was everything. They were just workers.

Just like how employees at McDonald’s and UPS today have their every move monitored and judged for efficiency, so too did the autoworkers on the first assembly lines find themselves transformed into easily replaceable cogs in a mechanized surveillance system. Your job was to complete your single rote task, faster and faster each day. If you failed, the company would no doubt find many more just like you.

In another depressing parallel to so many contemporary workplaces, when workers in General Motors plants complained, they were shuffled into a company grievance system (which the company sold as proof that workers didn’t need a union). This system addressed the individual grievance, at least putatively, but never with any positive implications for the collective. A squeaky wheel employee might get an individual raise, but they could never advocate for their colleagues. All this atomization had a clear purpose. Workers were taught that they had no identity outside of their job, nor any solidarity responsibilities to one another.

This was the all-too familiar backdrop for the Flint workers’ decision, on December 30th, 1936, to walk from a nearby union hall into their factories and shut the door behind them. Nobody was expecting them to win. The smart money was on the strike ending with the sit-downers either being tossed out on the street or left dead on the curb.

Do you know what it takes to successfully occupy three factories owned by one of the most powerful corporations in the world? And to do so in the dead of winter? In Michigan no less? And to hold onto that occupied territory in the face of saboteurs, informants, company thugs, Pinkerton detectives, and the entire force of the Flint Police Department and the Michigan National Guard?

It takes more than anger.

It takes more than charisma.

It takes more than some know-it-all systemic critique.

By the 1930s, plenty of fired up, “eat the rich” firebrands had already come and gone, some more effective than others. None of them had successfully catalyzed a mass American labor movement.

The sit-downers succeeded because, above all else, they took care of one another. That was their obsession, the single focus that animated their days and nights. Soon after occupying the Fisher body plants, the strikers set up an interlocking network of committees for security, food, recreation, education, mail, sanitation, communication with the outside world and the investigation of any and all rumors (the latter necessary in an environment where saboteurs often planted false rumors to divide the strikers).

Taking care of one another didn’t just mean having your needs met. It meant pitching in. Every sit-downer was responsible for daily chore duties, and there was a judicial system to ensure that workers who shirked their responsibilities were held accountable (usually with extra shifts the next day). There were so-called kangaroo court sessions, sometimes for actual juridical purposes, sometimes more for entertainment, as well as a strike orchestra, chautauqua-style seminars, and film showings (Modern Times, the Charlie Chaplin film where the Little Tramp suffers a mental breakdown from the drudgery of factory work, was especially popular). Morale wasn’t always high, food wasn’t always abundant, but the tightly woven support networks enabled the strikers to bend but never break.

An equally elaborate support network developed outside the factories. Flint’s women’s auxiliary was particularly sophisticated and effective, both in the traditional ways (ferrying information, food, and supplies to the strikers) and through direct action. After the cops and company thugs escalated their campaign of violence against the strikers (turning off the heat on a deathly cold night and shooting rounds of tear gas and bullets into the factory), a radical subgroup of the women’s auxiliary (the Emergency Brigade) set up a human shield between the cops and the workers, waving rolling pins and brooms and busting windows to enable the sit-downers to lob the tear gas canisters back. It is highly likely that strikers’ lives were saved by the broom-wielding brigade and their screamed refrain: “If you want to shoot them, you’ll have to kill us first.”

For forty four days, the sit-downers (and the broader community that rallied around them) didn’t crack. Their resilience was in part due to ideological commitment, but that alone wouldn’t have enabled them to hold out that long.

The strikers walked out of the factory on February 11th— alive, with a pay raise, and official recognition for their union— because the strike was an act of love, in the most active sense of the word. Love in the factory meant commitment to one another. Love meant meeting each other’s basic needs. Love meant vigilance and protection. Love meant accountability and collective responsibility. Love meant the recognition that the only way out was together.

Because the sit-downers loved, they succeeded, and because they succeeded, scholars now look back on the middle of the twentieth century as the glory days for American unionism. Shortly after the strike, UAW membership ballooned by the hundreds of thousands. There were 5000 labor actions in the remaining months of 1937 alone, across a wide variety of industries and geographies. Organized labor’s meteoric rise didn’t occur because the loudest voices with the biggest bullhorns suddenly became more articulate. It was, in large part, because a couple thousand workers and their family members in Flint prioritized community support above all else.

This isn’t just a Flint lesson, of course. It’s this same singular focus on community that has consistently set apart the most visionary organizers from the flash in the pan dilettantes. Decades after the Sit-Down strike, the FBI would acknowledge that it wasn’t the Black Panthers’ guns that made them such an acute threat to White supremacy (remember: no matter how many guns a social movement possesses, a police state always possesses more), it was their free breakfast and literacy programs. Likewise, at the end of the 20th century, on the other end of North America, the Zapatistas were able to occupy and liberate a significant chunk of the state of Chiapas from the Mexican government not because of their superior military might (again, the powers that be will almost always win in a gun fight) but because their communes and workers collectives had woven tight, mutualistic bonds between the rebels and their neighbors.

It’s hard to remember that lesson, though. It’s so much easier to buy into the myth that social movements succeed due to their blustery militancy. Some of that myth’s omnipresence is unique to this particular “look at me!” social media moment, but much of that is rooted in the old lies of patriarchy, White supremacy and individualism: the idea that change happens because the loudest (often male) voice fires up the masses to charge the barricades and start busting heads. We’ve all internalized those myths: the myth of the hero on horseback, the myth of sacred violence, the myth of the instant cleansing fire.

It matters that the UAW is choosing to directly reference the sit-downers as they announce their current strike. It matters strategically, of course (they too are asking their members to do something difficult— namely to remain on call for the moment that their local will be announced as the next “stand up” location), but it matters much more spiritually. It’s both an internal and external signal about what the union is prioritizing right now— the collective over the individual, the big picture over the minutiae of a single contract, the future that we all build together rather than the one where we are pitted against one another.

I hope that message is echoing throughout UAW halls. It will be, I’m sure, a difficult strike, with many attempts to break the strikers’ spirits. They will both need and will no doubt benefit from the example of their forebears.

But I also hope that message isn’t lost on the rest of us. It’s easy, even in a moment when celebrating “hot labor summer” has become de rigueuer on the left, to raise our symbolic fists in temporary digital solidarity before returning to our lives. And yes, that means that I hope we’re ready to support this strike over the long term. But more so, I hope that we to take the spirit of ‘37 more deeply to heart. I hope it impacts both how we engage in politics and what we view as political work.

Flint succeeded not because of any built-in advantages that we don’t possess today. 1937 was a pretty bleak year, all things considered. What the sit-downers had, though, was each other. And fortunately for us, that’s exactly what we’ve got too.

End notes:

Song of the week:

There is a time and a season for everything. And that includes music. Some days, the time is right for arch, jaded art school experiments, for irony and shaggy hair obscuring the guitarist’s eyes. But right now, he UAW is striking, which means that you know exactly what time it is. It’s time for a profoundly earnest British man to coax a beautiful bell-like “ting” out of a solo electric guitar and sing to us about working class solidarity. You know what, Billy Bragg? There IS power in union, just as there is power in all forms of community care.Let ‘er rip.

As always, the Song of the Week playlist, is on both Apple Music and Spotify.