16
Workers’ Direct Action and Factory Control in the United States
Immanuel Ness
This chapter examines decisive historical moments of workers’ control and self-management in the United States—the model capitalist state that, as demonstrated over the past century, supports predatory forms of labor exploitation. While workers repeatedly struggle to advance their rights, the apparatus of the capitalist state reflexively supports management efforts to gain absolute dominance through the suppression of direct mass action. The legal supremacy of capital is presupposed by management and labor unions.
The United States is the epitome of a capitalist paradise where, almost always, employers are assured full support of the state juridical and martial apparatus to repress those workers who break established rules of the labor-management engagement, unless businesses themselves abrogate agreements. In almost every historical example since the advent of mass production, workers have secured power only through breaking rules, striking, and occupying factories (Pope 2006). As a consequence, worker dissent is historically manifested through rank-and-file action surfacing in the workplace against the decrees of capital, the state, and, quite often, collaborationist trade unions.
In the last century, U.S. workers have almost always opposed management efforts to extract surplus value—reducing wages, imposing speedup, exposing the workforce to safety and health hazards, layoffs, implementing mandatory overtime, and more—through an array of strategies. Most workers are keenly aware that capital rejects living-wage standards and relentlessly reinvests surplus value, derived from the toil of workers of the past and present, into new enterprises employing lower-wage labor and modern labor-saving technology.
The history of militant workers’ resistance to these tactics of industrial capitalism provides evidence that U.S. workers have engaged in fierce struggles to defend their rights through a repertoire of collective action. The aspiration to workers’ self-management in the interest of democracy punctuates most mass labor insurgencies. Jerry Tucker, the legendary United Auto Workers (UAW) worker and organizer, asserts that we must move from a defensive posture of preventing corporate abuse to an offensive strategy of advancing worker power. To do so, “Workers must commandeer social space, both on the shop floor and in the community.” As such, Tucker considers the imperative driving workers’ struggles to be the quest for the social appropriation of privately owned economic and social resources (Tucker 2010b). Ultimately, worker dissent arises out of unsatisfactory wages and job conditions. But worker resistance against management can also challenge the corporate model of domination, and, in so doing, advance communal participation in the democratization of workplace decisions and the production of goods and services for collective needs rather than private interests.
The fundamental revolutionary nature of workers is established in workplaces and communities, as socialists from Marx and Lenin to Luxemburg and Gramsci have argued. Lenin recognized the centrality of workers in particular, as opposed to Karl Kautsky and the evolutionary socialists, maintaining in The State and Revolution that the formation of the soviet is not to “shift the balance of forces, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune or a republic of soviets of workers” (Lenin 1917/1998, 100). In the U.S. context, despite the intermittent and ephemeral nature of workers’ councils, the very act of commandeering the workplace is rooted in the self-activity of workers, against capital and labor bureaucracies that conform to or are unable to resist capital’s logic of the reckless domination of society.
Activism at the Point of Production
The prodigious history in the United States of organizing at the “point of production,” or on the shop floor, is what socialist labor unionists consider the “purest form of unionism.” In 1905, the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded to resist capitalist efforts to introduce new technology and low-wage labor, with the faithful support of the state. Today, as a century ago, workers remain under assault from the same efforts to impose new technology and lower wages, which increase labor competition and intra-class conflict by creating divisions that give rise to nativism and xenophobia toward immigrant laborers. The IWW Manifesto (1905) declared: “These divisions, far from representing differences in skill or interests among the laborers, are imposed by the employer that workers may be pitted against one another and spurred to greater exertion in the shop, and that all resistance to capitalist tyranny may be weakened by artificial distinctions.”
As this chapter on U.S. workers’ control demonstrates, workers have opposed labor union bureaucracies, supposed managerial benevolence, and employer domination through direct action—rather than relying on traditional employer- and trade union–based grievance systems and dispute resolution, which now prove less effective than at any time since the 1930s (Lynd 1992). While success is never certain, new forms of democratic unionism grounded in class solidarity are essential for breaking the absolute control of capitalists over workers. Yet concurrently, since the 1950s, organized labor has remained quiescent—as compared to European social democracies—failing to defend the organized working class, due to a justified fear that capital will migrate to lower-cost regions where greater profits can be reaped through extracting surplus value from cheap labor and advanced technology (Arrighi and Silver 1984).
U.S. Sit-Downs, Workers’ Control, Unionization: 1935–1939
We start with the assumption that labor seeks democratic control over its work, and factory takeovers are just one step in the process of workers’ control and self-management. From the 1930s to 2010, factory occupations have been contingent on four main factors:
1. Development of working-class consciousness, rooted in collective needs
2. Calculations of the economics of workers’ capacity to confront capitalists
3. Institutional arrangements in capitalist society regulating workers through the state. The state always privileges business over workers, except in crisis conditions, when modest concessions are provided to insurgent workers who demand control over social and economic resources
4. Capacity and support of workers’ efforts to self-organize and mobilize under repressive conditions
Toledo Auto-Lite Direct Action
The U.S. Midwest became the epicenter of the mass wave of workers’ factory occupations in mass-production industries to compel recalcitrant employers to recognize the newly founded labor unions. Following the success of militant rank-and-file insurgencies during the 1930s, which included mass pickets, sit-down strikes, and resistance to corporate and government violence, industrial workers achieved greater control over their workplaces. Militancy and insistence on democratic control became the norm among mass-production workers—so much so that employers were forced to back off from their relentless determination to dominate and repress workers in these industries.
In 1934, Toledo, Ohio, found itself the site of an epic class struggle as management and state police launched the first salvo against a resurgent workers’ solidarity movement demanding union recognition through strikes to improve wages and working conditions. The government, firmly in support of the Electric Auto-Lite Company of Toledo, waged a hot war against the workers, who stopped production with mass picket lines numbering up to ten thousand striking and unemployed workers. In this particular case, the striking workers and the unemployed prevented some 1,500 strikebreakers from entering or leaving the factory. On May 24, 1934, after the Ohio National Guard hurled gas bombs to disperse an assembly of six thousand workers, an intense battle was waged, killing two strikers and leaving more than two hundred injured. It is worth noting that the strike against Auto-Lite, launched by workers who were members of AFL Federal Union 18384 (an unaffiliated labor union), benefited from the active participation of unemployed workers organized by the Trotskyist-inspired Socialist Party and the National Unemployed League, led by A. J. Muste (Bernstein 1969, 221–229). The strike was won on June 2, 1934, when Auto-Lite agreed to a 5 percent wage increase and union recognition—an accord achieved only through worker solidarity at the factory gates. The strike inaugurated a five-year insurgency in mass production through direct action within the factories.
Akron Tire Worker Sit-Down Strikes
By most accounts, the surge of major sit-down strikes in the United States began in Akron, Ohio—an industrial center that produced tires for motor vehicles. In January 1936 workers seized control over the three largest tire companies—Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, Goodyear, and B. F. Goodrich—all of which refused to recognize the United Rubber Workers of America, the workers’ fledgling union, and ignored demands for fair work rules. In the tire production sector, the major rubber companies disciplined workers who challenged the company’s tyrannical control: in 1935 and 1936, when workers opposed management’s efforts to speed up production by extending the workday, 1,500 workers were sacked (Green 1998, 153). On January 29, 1936, after Firestone Tire & Rubber arbitrarily suspended a worker and refused to hold a trial, workers staged a fifty-five-hour occupation of the plant. The Firestone occupation sparked parallel sit-down direct actions at B. F. Goodrich and Goodyear by workers seeking a democratic workplace (Pope 2006, 6–11).
At the peak of the wave of factory occupations, some ten thousand tire workers in Akron resisted court injunctions to end the sit-downs, even opposing the United Rubber Workers Union’s efforts at conciliation, until they prevailed through a recognition agreement and establishment of fair work rules. Historian James Green asserts: “To the workers, the sit-down offered a new way to control their own strikes, ensure speedy negotiations, and prevent the sellouts they had experienced in the past” (1998, 153). Workers’ resistance to management supremacy in mass production represented a formidable challenge both to employers and to capital, which considered mass production as a means to exercise complete control through ownership of the means of production. Unlike with skilled craft workers, who could demand that employers abide by union wages and working conditions, management believed it could unilaterally impose wages and conditions on manufacturing workers, who did not own the means of production.
Flint Autoworker Sit-Down Strike
In 1936, an unambiguous labor insurgency had begun to form among industrial workers committed to the self-management of manufacturing enterprises, in opposition to the capitalists who had dominated production since the disappearance of a modicum of control by craft workers in the late nineteenth century. The sit-down movement, forged in factories, exemplified the democratic potential of workers’ control among millions of workers to establish rules and labor unions, challenge corporate despotism, and even advocate workers’ self-management of factories.
Certainly the economic depression of the 1930s degraded workers’ bargaining power through widespread unemployment and the vast industrial reserve army of labor, which drove down labor costs and weakened the embryonic labor unions. Concomitantly, expressions of syndicalism and demands for worker autonomy reached an apogee in the early twentieth century, dominating the consciousness of workers who recognized that management tactics such as speeding up production and raising piecework requirements were undermining their collective bargaining power. The ideology of individualism through hard work metamorphosed into a collective IWW ideology of “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
In December 1936, following the wave of sit-down strikes among tire producers and motor-vehicle parts plants, autoworkers in Michigan staged the most significant sit-down strikes in U.S. history to gain greater control of the workplace. In Flint, Michigan, on December 30, 1936, automobile workers initiated a forty-four-day occupation of General Motors’ Fisher Body Plants no. 1 and no. 2 in a showdown in which workers and UAW organizers resisted government injunctions and threats to call in the National Guard to crush the insurgency. Workers prevailed in an initial police assault on the Flint plants, sustaining the occupation with coordinated mass pickets outside the factory gates and preventing federal and state government officials from ending the sit-downs. The inside-outside strategy served to successfully stop automobile production and garner legitimacy and support among the majority of U.S. workers.
The Flint sit-down strike, which lasted more than six weeks, became the focal point of a class war against GM, the largest manufacturing company in the world. The UAW benefited from a mobilized and disciplined workforce motivated to take direct action through a major insurgency, despite police efforts to paralyze the strike through violence. Unquestionably, the workers’ occupation had the advantage of sympathetic picketers and ordinary residents in the city, who engaged in a struggle against police seeking to scatter them from the plant. In an ongoing battle that lasted into the early morning of December 31, police fired gas bombs to drive away the protesters, who in turn hurled rocks back at the police.
On January 11, the first day of the riot dubbed “The Battle of the Running Bulls,” Flint police attempted to disperse picketers and workers by commandeering a bridge and firing long-range tear gas shells. Despite their use of force, the police could not end the plant occupation; the mass picketers were firmly entrenched and refused to be dislodged until an agreement was reached to recognize their union (Fine 1969, 6–7).
Worker solidarity was unbroken, and due to political pressure, Michigan governor Frank Murphy rejected calling on the National Guard to stage a major confrontation, which would have further inflamed the conflict and contributed to popular militancy and outrage (ibid.). The workers’ occupation demonstrated that the conventional strike was not sufficient to gain unionization, given the implacable opposition of GM and other major manufacturers. To unionize the U.S. auto industry, workers had to occupy the plants and stand firm against compromise. The plant seizure ended on February 11, 1937; a month later GM negotiated a contract with the UAW governing workers—conceding only after the lone unionization campaign that genuinely succeeded in the automobile industry. According to Nora Faires, some 80 percent of Flint’s workers participated in the pickets and sit-downs that besieged GM and finally led to its surrender (1989).
Following the workers’ occupation in Flint, an unrelenting wave of sit-down occupations was sustained in mass production industries around the country. According to James Green, in the next year, some 400,000 workers participated in 477 workplace occupations (1998, 157) and the United States became the front lines of worker militancy worldwide. But worker power in manufacturing enterprises proved fleeting, in the short term due to GM’s persistent campaign against workers.
While the Flint sit-down strikes inaugurated a twenty-five-year period of tranquility in most plants, Sidney Fine argues the experience activated worker militancy that remained in many plants:
UAW members . . . were reluctant to accept the customary discipline exercised by management, and they “ran wild in many plants for months.” Union committeemen aggressively pressed the grievances of union members upon oftentimes unyielding foremen, and as some UAW member later conceded, “every time a dispute came up the fellows would have a tendency to sit down and just stop working (Fine 1969, 321).
At the same time, some GM managers antagonistic to the union disregarded the accord following the sit-down strike that paved the way for UAW representation. In the immediate aftermath of the Flint workers’ occupation, Fine notes that plant managers actively discriminated against workers who supported the union. Arthur Lenz, manager of the Flint Chevrolet plant, “had armed about one thousand nonunion workers with specially manufactured clubs and was marching them through the plant as to intimidate union and potential union members” (ibid.).
But beyond the threats and bullying, the workers’ democratic governance was also undermined by federal legal constraints and the emergence of labor union bureaucracy in the UAW.
The triumph of the workers’ plant occupations was considered a severe defeat for the U.S. capitalist class. Yet for more than seventy years, the strategy of the sit-down, despite its proven success, was replaced by collaboration between labor unions and employers, severely eroding workers’ solidarity and eviscerating the improved conditions won by workers. Subsequent UAW-sponsored actions were predominantly conventional strikes, which failed to increase or maintain membership and worker power in the auto industry as the union evolved into a centralized command structure that utilized collective bargaining and the relatively anemic strike weapon to win contracts.
Over the long term, the workers would be defeated by capital’s predictable response of undermining gains achieved only through worker militancy. GM found new ways to control and repress workers—without appreciable opposition from the UAW—through strict work rules, automation, restructuring, and the ultimate weapon of threatening plant closures: securing concessionary agreements and moving production when advantageous to the company. Nonetheless, worker militants have always sought innovative direct actions against the imposition of speedup of the assembly through automation, most notably the twenty-two-day strike of workers in Lordstown, Ohio, in March 1972, without the authorization of the UAW leadership. Though defeated, the workers demonstrated the resilience of the rank and file to oppose the management—as well as the bureaucratic national union (Garson 1994).
Emerson Electric Sit-Downs and Radical Unionism
The Flint sit-down strike is remembered as the culmination of the insurgent workers’ movement in the United States. The autoworker strike was a decisive development that spread to manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest. In most instances, the dramatic upsurge in labor militancy was rooted in the growing conviction among workers that self-organization was essential to improving their oppressive work lives and their communities. The militant movement for union democracy was organized by activists in UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) District 8, unique in the United States for its promotion of an insurrectionary brand of unionism, rooted in the principles of workers’ control over their organizations, workers’ occupation of factories, and even democratic community planning. The sit-down movement among UE locals in the Midwest was inspired by William Sentner, a syndicalist and also a member of the Communist Party, with a firm commitment to democracy, antiracism, and rejection of hierarchical labor organizations. In 1933, Sentner identified the CP’s Trade Union Unity League’s (TUUL) Food Workers Industrial Union, an organization of both employed and unemployed workers, as exemplary of a steadfast commitment to militant, antiracist union organizing (Feurer 2006, 36–40). The Food Workers Industrial Union called a strike for wage racial parity among black and white women workers employed at Funsten, a nut processing company in East St. Louis, Illinois, where some 40 percent of the workers were on relief. For ten days in May 1933, five hundred black women and two hundred white women staged a strike that doubled wages and provided for equal pay for black workers, even if failing to gain union recognition (ibid., 37–38).
The successful strike, waged through mass picketing, spurred organizing drives throughout the region, including the campaign to organize Emerson Electric in St. Louis, a plant with some two thousand employees, which culminated in the workers’ occupation of the entire factory, demanding union recognition, higher wages, and standardized work rules. Socialists were drawn to District 8 of the UE as it was categorically in favor of supporting workers’ direct action, unlike most CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions—which had, of course, benefited from worker insurrection to achieve union recognition and collective bargaining agreements with employers. Emerson Electric, a rapidly expanding producer of electric motors and fans, had installed a company-dominated union to prevent workers from forming their own organization.
By 1936, Emerson Electric workers were systematically joining UE Local 1102 and, in March 1937, UE Local 1102 declared it had obtained the support of all the workers in every department of the plant. Sentner, originally assigned by the CIO to organize steelworkers, turned all his energy and attention to UE’s Emerson Electric organizing drive (ibid., 50–56). The union had unqualified support among workers for the sit-down strike that began promptly at noon on March 8, 1937. Consequently, the workers’ occupation occurred in an orderly manner, as some two hundred of the youngest employees “went floor-by-floor escorting foremen out the door” (ibid., 56). As management was told to leave the facilities, hundreds of workers jubilantly encircled the plant.
Sentner and UE organizers emphasized that the sit-down was directed at building working-class power in the plant and community through direct action. Throughout the strike, Sentner stressed the connection between workers’ immediate demands and the issue of community and power, both for the strikers and the public. He linked the struggle to the city’s welfare: “Our organization, which is primarily interested in the economic welfare of the working people, is however also interested in the effects of their economic status on our community” (ibid., 57).
Sentner and UE Local 1102 organizers and workers sought higher wages for women; they ended the sit-down on April 29, after the company granted recognition of the union and agreed to collective bargaining. On May 14, workers gained modest wage increases, seniority rights, grievance procedures, and other boilerplate union language that later, unfortunately, would be used to hinder their power—including the no-strike/no-lockout clause.
The UE was at the forefront of CIO struggles, reaching 750,000 members at its peak through promoting direct action, racial and gender equality, worker militancy, and democratic unionism. However, by the late 1940s, the UE had fallen victim to the Red Scare and perception of Communist Party influence. By 1949, the UE was forced out of the CIO and replaced by the rival International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), a union not rooted in worker democracy (ibid., 225–238). As an independent, unaffiliated union, the UE remained viable and effective in organizing workers through appealing to worker democracy, class solidarity, and militancy. Although it lost members to factory closures like other unions, the UE did not engage in mass concessions to employers. The union’s rich legacy of workers’ control made famous by the Emerson Electric Strike was to foreshadow the Republic Windows and Doors sit-down seventy-one years later in December 2008.
Trade Unions and Worker Power on the Job
In the United States, as a result of the flight of manufacturing industry to more profitable destinations, workers’ demands from 1980 to 2010 have not even approached those of the time when heavy manufacturing industries were growing dramatically. Due to corporate disinvestment and the relocation of facilities to low-wage areas of production, workers employed in manufacturing throughout the United States and a growing number of European countries lost the political power of the 1930s–1950s. During that time significant power was brought to bear, forcing capitalists to recognize and bargain with the incipient mass-production unions. Worker militancy paved the way for the organization of unions and then for their recognition by the U.S. federal government through the landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Between 1936 and 1939 alone, U.S. workers occupied 583 plants, threatening employer hegemony over the workplace and sowing fear among a growing number of corporations. Mass sit-down actions in factories led to the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation in 1939, which circumscribed workers’ rights gained legislatively by effectively banning the sit-down occupation of factories (Galenson 1960, 145–148).
The 1930s sit-down strikes represented the apogee of working-class power in the United States. That trade unions did not oppose Fansteel revealed their own fear that sit-downs would erode their external bureaucratic influence as representatives who delivered labor peace and cordial industrial relations to management. Subsequently, unions went further to eviscerate member power through the World War II no-strike pledge and the purging of left-led unions that ensued after the passage of the 1949 Taft-Hartley Act. Devoid of militancy and ideology, labor unions grew increasingly irrelevant in the private sector due to worker cynicism and distrust of labor leaders, and by the early twenty-first century had been rendered almost inconsequential.
From 1940 onward, the vast majority of workers had few alternatives but to conform to repressive laws and embrace the propaganda of capitalist logic.
Neoliberalism, Deindustrialization, and Decline in Worker Power
The 1970s to 2010 saw periodic work actions and wildcat strikes among some fierce union locals, and militant autoworker in-plant strategies frequently slowed or averted concessions. Largely without the support of national union officials, workers challenged the major auto companies even as divestment from manufacturing and the relocation of production industries overseas reduced their leverage (Brenner, Brenner, and Winslow 2010). As an institutional force organized labor in the United States, as in Europe and beyond, devolved into a partner with capital. Detached from the rank-and-file members, organized labor manifested as an interest group seeking modest legislative reforms to permit growth within the labor market, but without the will or capacity to wage offensive actions as a class. For István Mészáros, labor union struggles for real working-class participation through democratic, fully autonomous self-management are doomed to failure within parliamentary representative systems, which invariably subordinate labor to the interest of capital:
For the ironical and in many ways tragic result of long decades of political struggle within the confines of capital’s self-serving political institutions turned out to be that under the now prevailing conditions the working class has been totally disenfranchised in all of the capitalistically advanced and not so advanced countries. This condition is marked by the full conformity of the various organised working class representatives to the “rules of the parliamentary game”. . .massively prejudiced against the organised force of labour and by the long established and constantly renewed power relations of capital’s materially and ideologically most effective rule over the social order in its entirety (2010, 11).
The sit-down strike and factory occupation remain the fundamental sources of worker power under capitalism; however sparingly used, they elicit fear throughout the capitalist class. Occupations of factories prevent and delay businesses from redeploying production to worksites in lower-cost regions and writing off the facilities for tax breaks.
Even more significantly, workers’ occupations are an ideological threat to capital and business, paving the way for an alternative to capitalist domination. Prohibition of the sit-down weakens workers and degrades their capacity to physically prevent capital from directing production and extracting further surplus value through labor savings, technological innovation, and relocation.
Concessionary Bargaining and Contained Worker Resistance
From 1940 to 2000, workers engaged in the sit-down strike sporadically, almost always against union advice. However, in part due to NLRB v. Fansteel, workers did not engage in mass sit-down factory occupations after the steel plant closures of the 1970s and 1980s, or amid the economic crises of the era. As an alternative to sit-downs, militant workers subjected to mass layoffs or surviving a severe economic crisis formed “unemployed committees,” also without palpable union support (Ness 1998). By the 1980s, efforts to control the workplace survived in the United States through “inside strategies” adopted by insurgent leaders in opposition to the prevailing pattern of concessionary bargaining that had abandoned even the pretense of oppositional class-struggle unionism.
By the 1980s, collective bargaining had shifted its pattern to bargaining for mediocre wage gains based on extraction of productivity gains (LaBotz 1991, 117). The preceding decade’s economic recessions and capitalist restructuring had augured a new era of bargaining through surrendering to employer demands for wage cuts, harsh work rules, speedup, and tiered workforces. If unions refused to concede at the bargaining table, corporations threatened to relocate production to low-wage regions with poor working conditions.
Most labor unions acceded to corporate absolutism, but some engaged in resistance campaigns through “inside” or “in-plant” strategies to regain a semblance of control over their jobs. Jerry Tucker, former director of UAW Region 5 in St. Louis, and later a candidate for the national union presidency in 1992, organized effective inside strategies in the early 1980s to counter concessionary contracts. Rather than striking, Tucker believed that worker resistance to concessionary agreements was best advanced by returning to work under expired contracts and engaging in an escalating strategy of direct action against repressive work rules. If workers struck, they risked permanent replacement under the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. Since President Reagan could fire air-traffic controllers occupying strategic positions, manufacturing workers constantly threatened by plant closures learned an important object lesson: to stay on the job.
From 1981 to 1983, Tucker orchestrated in-house strategies at the Moog Automotive Plant and Schwitzer Manufacturing and in 1984 at Bell Helicopter and LTV in North Texas, thwarting employer efforts to push through concessionary bargaining. Non-strike direct action, for a time, averted replacement.
Tucker and the workers embraced in-plant solidarity that mobilized workers collectively, undermining management by learning production and distribution schedules, implementing work-to-rule, periodic slowdowns, sickouts, and industrial sabotage. For Tucker, work-to-rule meant simply obeying the management’s rules. Inasmuch as management constantly seeks to accelerate production flows, it depends on workers to bend the official work rules and cut corners to increase output. But if workers abide by the company handbooks, production always falls short of management’s projections (Tucker 2010a; 2010b). The strategy of worker resistance challenged employer demands for concessions with solidarity drawn from the IWW adage: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
The effectiveness of in-house strategies was countered by capital’s initiatives to ban its practice in the courts and on the job, with carte blanche from government labor regulators. But UAW officials in Detroit also felt threatened by the in-house strategy’s success, which threatened bureaucratic union dominance and friendly relations with employers.
Financial Collapse and Workers’ Control
From 2008–2010, under the pretext of the financial crisis, capitalists have been determined to unload the debt burden from their books by closing factories and abrogating agreements with unions. In response, a growing number of workers vulnerable to layoffs across North America and Europe, both within and outside of unions, have resisted closures through sit-down strikes and other forms of direct action. Where unions are unwilling to resist the corporate assault on labor, militant workers are engaging in direct action through factory occupations and mass insurrections demanding that plants be reopened or layoff benefits improved.
Stirrings of a New Workers’ Control Movement
The traditional path of labor-management collective bargaining has taken a dramatic turn in the early twenty-first century. The current crisis in manufacturing has rendered nearly helpless a growing number of officially recognized unions with government-sanctioned collective bargaining agreements and could lay the basis for escalating direct actions by workers, possibly ushering in a more militant workers’ movement. As plants close and layoffs grow—and as workers recognize they can no longer interrupt the workflow with a strike when there is no flow to be interrupted—they increasingly engage in militant action to save their jobs and communities.
Over the last decade sit-down strikes were largely confined to Latin America and elsewhere in the global South, with workers occupying factories in response to economic collapse. But these same dynamics are moving to the global North, where throughout 2009 into 2010 workers occupied factories and engaged in other militant actions. Many of these actions have been in the syndicalist tradition of workers taking power directly; in some cases the workers have acted on their own, in others they have pressed lackadaisical unions for support.
In the United States, worker radicalism was in check for decades as unions offered up concessions to managers, ostensibly to save their factories. Although workers have been viewed by corporate managers as docile and weak-willed, “When workers are threatened by management they seriously consider breaking the rules and fighting back,” according to autoworker and activist Gregg Shotwell, a militant worker who helped form an insurgency in 2005 in the automotive parts industry (Shotwell 2008).
Shotwell, a worker at the Delphi auto parts plant in Flint, helped found Soldiers of Solidarity (SOS), a rank-and-file association that resists UAW policies of concessionary bargaining. SOS formed as a workers’ insurgency in November 2005 following Delphi’s dubious bankruptcy filing and the union leadership’s lackluster response. Workers at Delphi plants throughout the Midwest feared the worst—plant closures and abrogation of health and pension benefit agreements that were guaranteed after the auto parts unit was spun off by GM in 1999. Independent of the UAW, rank-and-file workers waged a mass “work-to-rule” campaign to sabotage the company’s plans for mass layoffs.
The 2005–2006 insurgency at Delphi was not a reprise of the Flint sit-down strike. Still, through direct action on the shop floor, including deftly organized slowdowns and work-to-rule—for instance, fixing machines only according to company guidelines—the production process was slowed at this firm seeking to break worker power. Lacking functioning equipment, Delphi workers were “putting machines down” without the support of the UAW, and ultimately saved their own health benefits and pensions. Says Shotwell, “A sit-down strike will not come out of a political philosophy, but will occur when workers feel they will lose everything if they stay complacent and take no action” (ibid.).
The global capitalist economic crisis is leading to the devaluation of labor-management contracts that had exchanged decent wage and benefit standards and a modicum of job security for labor peace. The closure of manufacturing plants in North America swelled the ranks of distressed, often older workers seeking to preserve the economic security they had once taken for granted. However, from 2007 to 2010, the crisis has exposed the failure of neoliberal capitalism to ensure economic security through either public or private means.
While we have yet to witness the recurrence of factory takeovers on a scale of the 1936–1939 sit-downs, today a resurgence of rank-and-file militancy is palpable. In just the last few years a growing number of workers, until recently viewed as conservative and quiescent, have taken matters into their own hands and engaged in the most militant of activities: forcing their unions to concede to their demands. As one example, Ford workers voted down a company plan—initially accepted by the UAW—to implement the same concessions as GM and Chrysler.
The UE and the Republic Windows and Doors Sit-Down Strike
By the 1990s, almost all U.S. trade union leaders were content with or resigned to concessionary bargaining, without workers’ participation, as a means of surviving and staying in power. In recent years national unions have organized workers in the rapidly growing healthcare, building services, distribution, and hospitality industries, but with few exceptions most of these unions were devoted to recognition and collective bargaining, founded on amicable relations with management. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose membership had grown most rapidly, often secured collective-bargaining agreements promising to halt worker mobilization against other divisions of companies where workers had organized. From 1990 to 2010, most workers were organized into U.S. unions through mergers, without direct participation or mobilization, and, as a rule, they were excluded from bargaining with management.
In manufacturing, worker power has been circumscribed by labor law, which forbids most forms of collective action and permits employers to replace striking workers. In 1995, in the first contested election for the presidency of the sclerotic AFL-CIO, the established U.S. labor federation whose leadership was unable to staunch the decline in union power, John Sweeney was elected on the “New Voice” platform, which campaigned on the need to commit the union movement to energizing itself and increasing membership by organizing nonmembers. Under Sweeney’s leadership the AFL-CIO espoused a new organizing rhetoric of economic fairness. Most trade unions appealed to the public for justice and equity through sloganeering and spent hundreds of millions on campaign contributions to elect sympathetic politicians in the Democratic Party, to fund jobs directly or indirectly dependent on public funding, and to reduce the legal impediments to organizing workers (a largely failed effort).
From 1970 to 2010, the number of unionized workers plummeted to record lows, particularly among those employed in the sacrosanct private sector. By 2008, unionization in the private sector had sunk to 7.5 percent; few workers were swayed by the advantage of membership, with the exception of immigrant workers often working at or below minimum wage. U.S. workers had largely become indifferent to unions, especially in manufacturing.
Thus the December 2008 sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago is punctuated by its context of industrial and economic crisis, in contrast to the 1936–1939 sit-downs, which occurred at a time of dramatic expansion of the U.S. manufacturing sector. The Republic sit-down strike is more akin to the factory occupations in Argentina of December 2001, another situation of economic crisis, during which workers commandeered failing factories slated for closure; this paved the way for the formation of hundreds of workers’ cooperatives (Sitrin 2006).
The major significance of the Republic factory occupation from December 4–9, 2008, lies in the replacement of the union in the years preceding the sit-down strike. In 2004, rank-and-file workers ousted the Central States Joint Board (CSJB), which ostensibly represented workers at the plant but excluded them from bargaining. CSJB had negotiated a concessionary three-year agreement in late 2001 that provided no wage increases, forced workers to pay for health insurance coverage, and included mandatory overtime. In an interview Armando Robles, a Mexican immigrant instrumental in organizing the strike, told journalist Kari Lydersen that in 2001 he was unaware that workers at the company were represented by a union. “Robles didn’t even know that the Republic workers had a union until a co-worker showed him how dues were deducted from his paycheck. He had never seen representatives of the union, and he was never informed of any meetings or ways he could have a say in union business. The CSJB rarely filed grievances on behalf of workers” (2009, 38).
Notably, Lydersen reveals that the workers, primarily Latino immigrants, had already taken direct action without union support prior to the December 2008 sit-down. In January 2002, workers went on a two-week wildcat strike, ending January 17, that was opposed by CSJB and was first breached by a shop steward who crossed the picket line. While the workers failed to gain a wage increase, they demonstrated crucial solidarity against their employer and corrupt union. Nearly three years later, on November 10, 2004, the workers organized themselves and voted to affiliate with the UE. Among some 450 workers employed at Republic, only 8 or 9 voted for CSJB (Lydersen 2009, 38–42). The new UE Local 1110 opposed concessionary bargaining and had a record of membership involvement and in-plant organizing strategies.
The valuable experience of the rank-and-file self-activity that ushered in the UE was put into action when, four years later, the Republic workers faced down the largest U.S. bank in order to defend their rights, force the company to abide by the law, and prevent the closure of the factory. The 250 to 280 remaining workers were prepared for resistance when Tim Widner, Republic’s plant manager, told them suddenly on Tuesday, December 2, 2008, that the plant would permanently close three days later, on Friday December 5.
Under the WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification), passed in 1988, mass layoffs require employers to inform workers sixty days in advance or to pay sixty days’ severance pay and health benefits; no pay for unused vacation. Republic blamed the economic crisis and the end of the housing bubble for sales that had dropped from $4 million a month to $2.9 million. In addition, workers were informed that Bank of America had withdrawn a line of credit essential to keeping the company open. At that time, the bank was a beneficiary of $45 billion in federal loans and $118 billion in federal loan guarantees as part of the U.S. government’s $700 billion bailout of ailing financial companies.
Weeks earlier, Robles and other workers had observed the removal of essential production machinery from the factory and informed UE organizer Mark Meinster. In advance of the closure announcement, the workers and union together planned to occupy the plant to prevent the closure and relocation of the facility.
On Tuesday, December 2, the workers assembled in the cafeteria for the official announcement were told that they would not receive severance pay, health benefits, or pay for accrued vacation time. Upon receiving official notice of the plant’s scheduled closure, the workers initiated a campaign of resistance against Bank of America and Republic. Beyond the workers’ demands for back wages, the sit-down strike drew national attention to the depravity of finance capital, blatantly exposing what everyone already knew or suspected: government is eager to protect capital and indifferent to workers victimized by banks and financial institutions. As well, the workers had discovered that Richard Gillman, Republic’s CEO, had plans to relocate the facility to Red Oak, Iowa. In addition to demanding severance, vacation pay, and health benefits, the workers also wanted the plant—where they had developed a collective class consciousness—to stay open in Chicago.
In response to an outpouring of public support for the striking workers, local and national politicians came out in support of the factory occupation, which violated the Supreme Court’s Fansteel decision sanctifying privateproperty rights. The workers had support from progressive Democratic Party elected officials, especially U.S. Representative Luis Gutierrez, a supporter of the Republic workers since their 2003 wildcat strike. Even president-elect Barack Obama responded positively to the workers’ demands: “When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right” (Pollasch 2008).
The Republic sit-down strike was turning into a colossal embarrassment for the government and corporate America, which recognized that if the workers’ occupation were not ended soon, public opposition to the financial bailout would grow to a fever pitch. On December 10, under growing scrutiny, a settlement was brokered between Bank of America and J. P. Morgan Chase to provide funds to Republic to pay each worker six thousand dollars and two months’ health coverage (as required under the WARN Act). But the workers wanted the factory to remain open. Two months later, in February 2009, the company was sold to Serious Materials, a Sunnyvale, California–based, private, green-energy firm seeking to expand its production of windows and glass (see Seriousmaterials.com). The company agreed to rehire all the former Republic workers, with union recognition, at the wage rate prior to the plant’s closure.
How relevant is the Republic case to union and nonunion workers in manufacturing and other industries? Certainly the workers succeeded in gaining all their demands as well as the reopening of the factory during a period of mass layoffs across North America and Europe that accompanied the global financial crisis. The fact that during this same period autoworkers granted major concessions to GM and Chrysler without resistance reflects a failure to recognize that workers are capable of independently resisting and interfering with closures. Republic’s attempts to circumvent labor law governing mass layoffs may reflect a lack of savvy among mid-sized businesses in defusing worker anger. However, considering that many companies subcontract production, the hemorrhaging of jobs could trigger a wave of firms that close without providing adequate notice or compensation to workers. In this vein, from 2008 to 2010 in France, Ireland, Korea, China, and the UK workers responded to corporate deception in closing factories with a wave of sit-down strikes, including at Visteon, the auto parts firm spun off from Ford. In a globalized capitalist environment, economic crisis disproportionately destabilizes those workers employed or contracted by major corporations.
Although workers’ occupations are disparaged by labor unions and corporations alike as obsolete and ineffective means of defending workers’ rights, the argument fails to acknowledge the direct challenge workers’ control poses to corporate hegemony. The Republic sit-down strike of 2008 was the most highly publicized recent example of workers’ demands for controlling their economic destiny.
Conclusions
Worker direct action, which has manifested in U.S. history through sit-down strikes and factory occupations, is opposed by both capital and labor union representatives. Entrenched traditional trade unions oppose workers’ control or self-activity that transfers power from union headquarters to the workplace. To ensure orderly relations, union leaders require hierarchical control and organizational loyalty rather than worker solidarity within the workplace and among workplaces. Most established unions appear to many workers as obsolete—ill-prepared for challenging corporate autocratic hegemony, with a sluggish, bureaucratic leadership and a structure antithetical to many workers’ interests. The concept of workers’ control as envisioned by the workers themselves is now being co-opted by management to suggest, outlandishly and subversively, that corporations themselves can be embodiments of freedom: As Slavoj Žižek observes:
Instead of a hierarchical-centralized chain of command, we now see networks with a multitude of participants, with work organized in the form of teams or projects.... In such ways, capitalism is transformed and legitimized as an egalitarian project: accentuating auto-poetic interaction and spontaneous self-organization, it has even usurped the far Left’s rhetoric of workers’ self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan into a capitalist one (2009, 52).
Since the dominant model of business unionism has been failing workers, new models of workplace democracy are emerging. In contrast to organized labor’s ineffectual and desperate efforts to preserve the past, some corporations purport to recognize workers’ wishes for emancipation from oppressive bureaucratic structures.
However, the past lessons of workers’ control indicate the need for a future of mass collective action, not the cultivation of a “horizontal workplace.” Most labor unions and progressives disparage the sit-down strike or the self-organization of manufacturing and service enterprises as old-fashioned tactics that workers today are reluctant to understand and practice. These critics overlook the fact that worker-control strikes and direct action are vital expressions of opposition to employer repression in the workplace. As the factory increasingly becomes a relic of the past, the organizations of workers’ control in emerging sectors of the economy will assume new forms, reflecting the transformation of economic activities and the increasing importance of service and public workplaces. With the reconstitution of capital and ongoing changes to the work process, workers will engage in new arenas of struggle that may involve the formation of socially useful forms of labor.
To advance a democratic and socialist future, workers will need to engage in resistance and insurgency against the established forces. As democracy erodes and corporate autocratic practices expand in both manufacturing and service sectors of the economy, workers’ desire for emancipation from employer oppression will increase—and the struggles of the past will stand as enduring examples of the actuality of workers’ self-management and control over enterprises and communities. Missing are the social agencies that could offer workers practical alternatives to capitalist domination, but as the hypocrisy of the “horizontal workplace” is self-evident across an economy increasingly dominated by service sectors, in time workers will no doubt demand self-management and control over their economic future. As in the natural environment, while most sparks or thunderbolts do not catch fire, the embers flicker on, waiting for the next combustible moment.
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Interviews:
Shotwell, Gregg. 2008. Interview by author. September 18–19.
Tucker, Jerry. 2010a. Interview by author. March 8.
———. 2010b. Interview by author. August 14.