In recent years workers activity has bubbled nationwide. In the service and retail sectors, in nursing and health care, in transport and distribution, in entertainment, and of course in heavy industry like auto and airplane production, workers have organized and moved towards forming unions and in some cases struck to win back past concessions. Worker led actions and union organizing continue to percolate into 2024. These are clear signs that workers are tired of being harshly exploited, that they are willing to fight back against corporate power, and that they are feeling out their own potential power. But worker power and activity is still far behind where it stood decades ago.
To understand better the potential power of organized working people, it is worth looking back to 1945, when on November 21 of that year the United Auto Workers (UAW) began the largest strike in their history and helped begin what at its peak would be the largest strike wave in U.S. history.
The Background
Image source: Bird, W. L., Rubenstein, H. R. (1998). Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front. Princeton Architectural Press.
As the United States entered World War II in early 1942, the unions that had been created and demonstrated real power in the mid and late 1930s already showed signs of weakening, and big business and their political leaders were challenging them at every turn. The leaders of these unions were rarely as militant as the workers they represented. Union leaders, particularly those on the national level, generally either tagged along behind their memberships’ actions, hoping to moderate them and stay in a leadership role, or tried to stop their members from striking or demanding too much in the first place. In the late 1930’s, CIO leaders (not to mention more conservative AFL affiliated leaders) did all they could do stifle the sit-down movement. In 1941, UAW leadership passed their first resolution prohibiting members from belonging to organizations not loyal to the United States, primarily meant to exclude any form of Communists or socialists. And owners even began to realize that unions with “responsible” union leaders could actually be good for them – contracts and union leaders could restrict more radical members from walking out or sitting in, and kept them from looking to challenge the system, or for more revolutionary alternatives.
President Franklin Roosevelt still attempted to appear neutral and courted labor’s support, but he would not tolerate labor radicalism, particularly any that interfered with production for World War II. He created and used four separate wartime agencies to regulate, control, limit and sometimes outright repress labor.
Union leaders showed little inclination to challenge government repression, other than with occasional rhetoric. But even that was little and far between. As the war began, most leaders of both the AFL and the CIO, with no input from their members, agreed to a No-Strike Pledge for the duration of the war. Sidney Hillman, leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union and a staunch Democratic supporter, said openly, “a way must be found to stop defense strikes.” And, counterintuitively, heavily influenced by or with leaders from the Communist Party of the United States (guided in most of their policies by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union), many union leaders threw their full weight behind the No-Strike Pledge, arguing that workers should put their bread-and-butter issues aside and support the war effort in order to support the Soviet Union. Labor leaders, in other words, were helping the President tie workers hands behind their backs!
As the war went on, conditions worsened for workers in a number of ways. While corporate profits skyrocketed and government oversight of corporate abuse barely existed, the aforementioned wartime agencies went after the slightest hint of strikes, allowed prices to rise consistently, and shot down requests for wage increases. Needless to say, this emboldened bosses further, and they pushed workers to the limits. Workers were working harder, getting paid less, and seeing a decline in their already humble standards of living. After three years of war, according to one observer, “the situation in which labor now finds itself is intolerable.”
Workers Self-Activate
As the war continued, workers began taking matters into their own hands, protesting and striking in violation of their contracts and against orders from their union officials. Workers began organizing “quickie” strikes, an even more informal term for wildcat strikes, or strikes undertaken on the spot, without official approval. There were nearly 3,000 such strikes in 1942 alone. As had occurred in the period prior to 1934, and as in the three big strikes of 1934 and the sit-down strikes of 1936-1937, workers were self-activating, organizing and planning amongst themselves, and forming their own strike committees. These “quickie’s” caused innumerable problems for the bosses, and showed workers their potential power, even without support from their so-called leaders.
Disenchanted with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, in 1943 and 1944 millions of workers fought within their own unions for the creation of a Labor Party, independent of the two major parties. In this again, they were fought tooth and nail by their own union leaders, who had hitched their fate (and that of their workers) to the Democratic Party and Roosevelt.
The largest bright spot during the war took place in 1943, when the coal miners of the UMW, still led by John L. Lewis, waged a tough struggle against the federal government, winning a strike in the middle of the war despite violating wartime restrictions and despite no support from the CIO unions. One militant and author described this strike as labor’s “Second Gettysburg,” a strike so significant that it saved the labor movement from falling backwards towards loss, as the 1936-1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike had then saved labor from sliding backwards after the victories of 1934.
But again, most CIO leaders often worked hand in hand with management and government to stifle strikes and worker activity, and gave their complete support to Roosevelt and the war effort. Stalinist union leaders in particular went to almost unbelievable lengths to suppress worker activity. In 1944 Communist Party Chairman Earl Browder actually said: “If JP Morgan supports this coalition…I as a Communist am prepared to clasp his hand and join with him to realize it. Class divisions…have no significance now.” Not only were the leaders of their unions unable and unwilling to lead the working class, the largest left wing political party that claimed to represent the working class was now willing to clasp the hands of arch-capitalists as they squeezed the working class even harder.
Despite conservative, bureaucratic and arguably traitorous leadership, workers refused to take it anymore. Tired of declining standards of living while capitalists grew wealthier, and with a first taste of the initial layoffs that accompanied the end of the war, the massive surge of worker struggle began. As the allied powers defeated Germany in May of 1945 and then Japan in August, the workers of the United States rose in a wave, in small numbers and sporadically at first. It started with strikes of tens of thousands of New York longshoremen, San-Francisco-Oakland machinists, New England textile workers, midwestern truck drivers, and a coal strike of 200,000 miners. Throughout the summer of 1945 there were never less than 400,000 workers on strike on any given day. New President Harry Truman and corporate bosses tried desperately to slow the wave down through a combination of intransigence and state repression.
G.M. Workers Lead the Way
The largest and most significant of these strikes was the UAW strike that began on November 21. In September, auto workers at the “Big 3” – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – pushed their UAW leadership to demand an industry-wide wage increase of 30%. In response, Ford locked out 50,000 workers. Representatives for G.M. auto workers called for a nationwide “Congress of American Labor” to organize the entire working class for battle, and called for a strike to begin within two months. In early November, when Ford workers were polled they voted 11 to 1 to commence a strike, although a strike date was not then set. Worker militants of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) began an “Open the Books” campaign demanding that all corporations open their books for public scrutiny so that workers could see how much profit the corporations were raking in as they claimed they couldn’t increase wages. While Walther Reuter and the UAW leadership did not lead this movement, and did nothing to help build worker power, they could neither ignore it nor stifle it. Workers were in motion, and the stage was set.
On November 21, this day in 1945, 225,000 workers at General Motors left 92 separate production sites in 50 cities. Workers in Detroit, Flint, Cleveland and Toledo filled exuberant picket lines, staffed communal kitchens and steered “flying squadrons” that moved about the cities supporting picketers and making sure management couldn’t bring in replacement workers. What had been a growing wave of small, regionalized strikes became a nationwide conflict.
Truman and the Democratic political establishment made clear that the strike was against the public interest, and that it “strikes at the root of orderly government.” And he was right – a strike of this scale had the potential to disrupt his government that represented the capitalist class. He demanded they end the strike and return to work.
After two weeks of the strike, a national delegates conference of striking workers rejected Truman’s back-to-work demand and another, slightly better offer by G.M. The strike continued. As they had in the 1936-1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike, auto-workers were leading the way for the larger working class.
As the strike continued into late December, some of the smaller strikes were settled, and for weeks the G.M. workers held out alone, refusing to break under the pressure from the government, the company, or the sacrifices that come with a strike. Despite the end of the war, unions dominated by Stalinist leaderships either quietly ignored the growing conflict or actively discouraged support for the strike.
But dozens of other CIO unions, some in big industries like electrical equipment, meatpacking and steel, were going through the process of dead-end negotiations, and were preparing for strikes. The auto workers at Ford (whose workers had already voted for a strike) and Chrysler were also on the verge of striking.
In January 1946 the explosion happened. 300,000 plus auto-workers from Ford and Chrysler struck. 174,000 electrical workers struck, then 200,000 meatpackers, then 750,000 steelworkers! On January 21, at least 2 million workers were on strike in basic industries alone. It was a truly nationwide class conflict.
While the largest shutdowns came in the big industrial cities, places as diverse as Stamford, Conn., Houston, Texas, and Lancaster, Pa. and others had small scale general strikes lasting one or two days. 1.6 million Black workers participated in the upsurge and hundreds of thousands of women manned picket lines and ran soup kitchens. Even returning war veterans supported the strikers in large numbers, recognizing that the workers deserved better pay and dignified work after the sacrifices they had made during the war. Numerous marches of union war veterans showed solidarity. In far away places like Guam and Manila, US troops protested against their commanding officers and against their continued presence as an army of occupation. On G.I. wrote back from Germany that “The fact is the GI’s have strike fever!”
In February the force of the strike wave began to ebb, but not because the workers had been entirely satisfied. In some cases cases, union leaderships negotiated settlements with political and corporate leaders without membership approval. First the packinghouse workers returned to work. Then UAW leaders came to terms with Chrysler and Ford, and the auto-workers for those two companies returned to work. Then the steelworkers returned to work, leaving the G.M. workers as the only major union membership still on strike. Rubber workers also ended a strike, although with large wage gains that would later set a standard for the entire auto industry. Despite victories, these returns weakened the solidarity that had previously been shown by the working class for the previous month, and on which the G.M. workers relied.
But even then, as the strike dragged on into its third month, G.M. workers stood strong. Refusing to bow to pressure from Truman or the stonewalling tactics of the company, they slowly wore the company down. Finally, on March 13, after 113 days on strike, G.M. gave in to a compromise set of U.A.W. demands. Workers won a significant wage increase (18.5%), with retroactive pay increases going back to November, and paid vacations.
By the end of 1946, and particularly with the victory of the long auto-strike, the strike wave slowed and came to an end. In total, nearly 5 million workers had struck in 1946, making it by far the largest one-year labor upsurge in US history. The gains were tangible, and created the basis for the at least decent standard of living that many workers would have in the US in the thirty years that followed the war. Almost all the strikes ended with full union recognition and acceptance, often significant wage increases, the beginnings of health and pension packages, and a ripple effect of pay increases and similar work conditions rippling out to millions of other workers not directly represented by the biggest unions.
Image source: Harold Story Papers Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society via Encyclopedia of Milwaukee.
Lessons for Today
The 1945 auto strike against G.M. and the larger strike wave it was a part of and it helped stimulate was a huge success, and again showed the potential power and the potential militancy of the American working class. Even in the face of state bureaucracies’ intent on repressing any challenge to the war effort and their huge profits, and even with moderate and bureaucratic leaderships dulling the edge of the class conflict, workers still fought back and organized on a massive scale to fight for the interests of their entire class! In 1945 and 1946 the power and militancy of the U.S. working class was on full display.
Although after 1946 and until recently we witnessed a decline in both union strength and worker militancy, the events of that year can still serve as a shining example of what we can do when we organize ourselves, take action ourselves, and recognize that our class interests stand clearly opposed to those of our bosses and their government.
