Remembering another occupy.

• Author: Fitz, Don
• Position: Thinking Economically

Anniversary of the 1973 Sit-Down Strike Wave

The year 2012 marks the 75th anniversary of the great sit-down strike wave of 1937. It also begins the second year of the Occupy movement, which has more than a few similarities to the time when hundreds of thousands of Americans occupied their workplaces.

The first recorded sit-down in the US was actually in 1906 among General Electric workers of Schenectady, New York. When three organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) were fired, 3,000 of their fellow workers sat down and stopped production. By the 1930s, the IWW was on the wane, but many of its organizers were active, and workers across the US had seen its tactics first hand.

In 1933, workers in the Austin, Minnesota Hormel plant had many complaints against the company: raises habitually went to foremen's friends; workers were fired and then rehired in other departments at lower pay; before election day, foremen would threaten layoffs if Farmer-Labor Party candidates won; and employees who challenged the practices were told that they could quit. The final straw came when Jay Hormel, who fancied himself to be a "benevolent dictator," attempted to impose a weekly paycheck deduction for an insurance plan.

When a man in Hog Kill was pressured to sign up, other workers shut down the floor for 10 minutes until his insurance card was torn up. News of the brief sit-down spread throughout the plant. That July night, workers met at Austin's Sutton Park to form a union.

The union charter followed the IWW pattern of grouping all workers into one big union regardless of craft. It invited membership from laborers throughout Austin and the surrounding area. They named themselves the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW).

Jay Hormel promised to recognize the union, grant seniority rights, and arbitrate grievances. But, for six weeks, Hormel refused to put anything in writing, and on November 10 workers voted to strike. Farmer-Laborite Governor Olson made public speeches backing the strikers while he secretly mobilized National Guards 30 miles from Austin.

Support for the strike was overwhelming. Since the IUAW had endorsed farmers' efforts to raise their prices, the Farmers' Holiday Association patrolled roads leading into Austin to halt livestock and scabs. Strikers occupied the plant, and, as Stan Weir told the story,

Food, bedding, cigarettes, reading material and playing cards were brought to them by family and friends. They came out of the plant several days later with one of the first industrial union contracts in mass production history. The best-known early sit-down strikes were in Ohio. Jeremy Brecher described their humble beginnings in his book Strike! Sometime in the early 1930s, two factory baseball teams in Akron, Ohio objected to the umpire because he was not in the union. They stopped playing and sat in the field until a new...