First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 8, February 28, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Forty years ago in Flint Michigan, thousands of auto workers battled police, company goons and fascist anti-labor squads in order to build the United Auto Workers union (UAW). It took a 44-day sit-down strike against General Motors and a vast mobilization of workers and supporters to win recognition of the workers’ right to a union.
Four decades after this historic battle (the sit-down ended Feb. 11, 1937), the top UAW misleaders sat down at the luxury St. Regis hotel in Detroit with GM’s leading spokesmen to share steak and drink toasts to “celebrate” the anniversary of the Flint strike. They drank to their “healthy and constructive relationship,” as GM chairman Thomas Murphy described the GM-UAW love affair.
Union president Leonard Woodcock praised the peaceful collaboration between the two, noting that their relationship had “matured considerably over the years“ and that the UAW and GM were “allies in the greater context.” GM’s Murphy reminisced about the workers’ struggles of the ’30s, calling them “growing pains.” Woodcock agreed.
When some rank-and-file workers found out about this gala affair, from which every veteran of the Flint strike was excluded, they accused their misleaders of “betrayal of everything we fought for. ”
UAW’s GM negotiator Irving Bluestone retorted, saying that the union leadership hadn’t changed its colors but that GM itself had changed its stand towards the union and the workers. Bluestone insisted that GM head Murphy had “actually become a blue collar executive.”
At this banquet of class collaboration, the UAW labor lieutenants drew the lesson from the heroic Flint strike that class struggle isn’t necessary any more because GM has become a “friend” of the workers. They used the dinner and occasion of the Flint strike to cover up the brutal exploitation of auto workers that GM and the rest of the monopoly capitalists carry out every day, squeezing ever greater profits out of the workers’ labor.
If anything, the Flint strike showed that the capitalists never give up an inch to the workers without determined class struggle on the part of the masses of working people.
The Flint strike was a great chapter in the working-class struggle in this country and represented a decisive breakthrough for industrial unionization. It reflected a high tide in the class struggle in the 1930s. During this period, hundreds of thousands of workers of all nationalities under the leadership of communists challenged the capitalist system.
The revolutionary upsurge which accompanied these early union drives struck terror into the heart of the capitalists. Forced to recognize the unions, they altered their tactics, striving to control the workers’ organizations through a new line of trade union misleaders.
The capitalists promoted social democrats like Walter Reuther in order to channel the union movement along the path of reformism.
In addition, the degeneration of the CP into a revisionist party in the period after the Flint strike disarmed the workers and left them without a revolutionary vanguard. This made it much easier for the capitalists to get their lieutenants like Reuther into top office.
The abandonment of the revolutionary struggle by the CP and the rise to power of the reformist misleaders are also part of the heritage and lessons of the Flint strike. The story of the Flint strike began with the plans of UAW members to strike GM in early 1937. The GM bosses got wind of the strike plans and tried to remove the tools and dies to another location.
The workers saw the need to begin the strike immediately and occupied the GM plant on December 29, 1936. They refused to leave their machines, and followed the tactics of earlier sit-down strikes which had been successful in other parts of the country.
In-plant organization and general strike strategy were developed under the guidance of the most dedicated union members and communists. Inside the Flint Fisher Body No.1 plant, for example, workers elected a mayor and a council, arranged for self-defense, political education, medical care and so on. Many of those elected to the strike committee, including the mayor, were communists.
Outside the plants, workers organized picket lines and defense protection as well as food and clothing brigades. Women and families of strikers also stood guard outside the plant, alongside hundreds of sympathizers.
The capitalists tried everything to break the strike, but the workers stood firm. They exposed an injunction issued against them by a judge who owned over $200,000 in GM stock. When GM shut off access to food supplies on Jan. 11, workers fought back in the “Battle of Bulls Run.” They forced the police to retreat with a torrent from fire hoses, metal door hinges and bottles. Although it was close to zero degrees outside, hundreds of militant supporters joined in the defense.
Workers defeated attacks from the fascist Black Legion, prevented a GM-initiated “back-to-work” movement, and, in a daring move in late January, widened the strike by closing’ down additional GM plants.
Unable to break the workers’ unity and militancy, GM caved in Feb. 11, 1937, recognizing the union. Soon afterwards, workers won union recognition at Chrysler. Within a year, UAW membership jumped from 38,000 to 380,000.
The Communist Party gave steady and strong leadership in these battles against GM. Communists showed concretely how the trade union movement could be wielded as a revolutionary tool, uniting the broad masses of workers in the fight against capital. But in the period after the strike, when the revisionist Earl Browder consolidated his hold over the party, it abandoned the path of class struggle and practiced a line of reliance on reformists like Walter Reuther. Under Browder’s leadership, ship, independent communist work and organization were liquidated altogether.
Browder’s revisionism exerted its influence before his line gained domination over the party. Even in the Flint strike, aspects of Browderism could be seen. A view was promoted, for example, that the solution to the workers’ problems lay exclusively in building a militant trade union. This downplayed the role of the party and the revolutionary aims of the workers’ movement. It helped set the stage for the rise to power of trade unionists like Reuther, who were “militant” in their rhetoric, but completely wedded to the capitalist system.
Reuther made an alliance with the CP and used a trip he and his brother Victor had made to the Soviet Union as credentials to pass himself off as a “revolutionary” leader of the workers’ movement. He had never been a production worker himself in the auto plants. Upon returning to the States in the late ’30s during the great union drives, he wrangled a job as a full time organizer. Reuther courted the CP to get his “in” for a job and later to obtain the presidency of a Detroit Westside local.
Once in office, Reuther turned furiously against the communists, slandering the USSR and maneuvering to expel communists and other progressive workers from the union leadership. While GM had failed to stop the union movement, Reuther served the GM bosses even better by blunting the revolutionary struggles in the union and limiting the scope of demands to narrow trade unionist ones. Instead of mass mobilization of the rank and file, Reuther preached reliance on the FDR new dealers and liberal imperialists.
Reuther built up his own machine in the UAW, filling the developing bureaucracy with his agents, many of whom make up the inner circle of the UAW today. Following World War II, he carried out a purge of communists and other militant fighters. He made sure that the strongest union locals were brought firmly under his control.
The Reuther leadership talked a lot about the fight against discrimination, for economic justice, for women’s rights and other rank and file demands. But underneath all this talk, Reuther maneuvered to take the rank-and-file initiative out of these struggles. He turned auto workers’ militancy into nothing more than a “pressure group” of people writing letters to their congressmen and campaigning for Democratic Party candidates.
As a result, the UAW was robbed of its fighting capacity. Sellout contract followed sellout contract. The union bureaucracy became the auto barons’ best tool for crushing the rank-and-file movement. The Communist Party, while it overthrew Browder’s rotten leadership in the ’40s, degenerated into a revisionist party in the 1950s. From that time until the present, it has served as a lackey of the liberal Reuther-Woodcock leadership.
The history of the UAW from the Flint strike to the present points to the particular danger that the reformists pose to the workers’ movement, especially in times of rising revolutionary consciousness and struggle. Reuther’s modern-day followers led by Woodcock are playing a similar role today, trying to derail the rank-and-file movement as it begins to grow strong.
The history of the Flint strike and the betrayal typified in the UAW-GM feast in commemoration of this heroic struggle should stand as a call to UAW members to overthrow this class-collaborationist leadership.