![]() ![]() For the next six weeks Flint would be a lead story in newspapers, newsreels, and radio news-casts. Thus began, on December 30, 1936, the great Flint sit-down strike, the most momentous confrontation between American labor and management in this century. Then a third-floor window swung open and a worker leaned out, waving exultantly to Travis. For long minutes nothing seemed to be happening. Instead of the usual answering pound of machinery, there was only silence. ![]() Travis was watching anxiously in front of the union hall when the starting whistle blew. “Shut her down! Shut the goddam plant!” In a moment the hall was a bedlam of cheering.Īs the dinner break ended, the men streamed back into Fisher One. ![]() “We want them left right here in Flint.” There was a chorus of agreement. “Well, what are we going to do about it?” Travis asked. Two days earlier, he reminded the men, fellow unionists had struck the Fisher Body plant in Cleveland now, fearing Flint would be next, General Motors was trying to transfer the vital stamping dies to its other plants. Travis confirmed the rumor crackling through the huge plant: dies for the presses that stamped out car body panels were being loaded into freight cars on a Fisher One spur track. When the swing shift took its dinner break at 8:00 P.M. It was the signal for an emergency union meeting. Suddenly a bright red light began flashing in the window of the United Automobile Workers union hall across the street from the plant’s main gate. At General Motors’ Flint, Michigan, Fisher Body Number One, the largest auto-body factory in the world, it was early evening of a chill winter day. ![]()
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