75th anniversary of victorious UAW strike at GM

Striking autoworkers read in General Motors' Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint during the winter strike of 1937. The fledgling United Auto Workers won its first national contract with GM in what became known as the Flint sit-down strike.

The Detroit News:

Strike veterans recall effort that sparked labor movement

Flint — In February 1937, Geraldine Blankinship was a vivacious 17-year-old in a red beret and cape, dodging police and company thugs to get food to her father and thousands of other striking auto workers occupying General Motors Co.'s Fisher No. 1 body plant and other nearby factories.

Today, the United Auto Workers will mark the 75th anniversary of the victory they won over GM — a victory that forced the company to sign the first national contract with the union and sparked the growth of the U.S. labor movement. It is a victory that Blankinship and other veterans of what became known as the Flint Sit-Down Strike say is as important in 2012 as it was in 1937.

Instead of picking up picket signs, they were going to sit down and refuse to move. It was a move aimed at keeping GM from bringing in strikebreakers or moving the equipment to another factory.
Farmers were excused so they could go home and tend their animals, but Wiecorek and the rest stayed in the factory. When the company cut off the heat, they fired up the big oven in the paint shop and huddled around it. Their wives and daughters formed the Women's Emergency Brigade to smuggle food to the strikers and carry picket signs outside.

Continue reading here.