Great Depression and Oral History

Great Depression and Oral History

The Flint Sit-Down Strike occurred between 1936 and 1937 by workers of the General Motors Company. Up until this time, there were very few strikes through the United States. The strikes that did occur were talked about very little and were considered to be small. The Sit-Down Strike occurred because of the poor working conditions and the manner in which the men and women who worked for GM were treated on a day-to-day basis. According to Leo Connelly, he started at 50 cents an hour and many were never given raises throughout their entire working career before the strike occurred.

On May 30, 1980, Louis Ganscos admits that in looking back, wage increases didn't seem like the primary cause of the strike. The strike occurred mainly because of poor working conditions. Ganscos describes having little sense of security, without benefits and a boss that was always right, regardless of what was said or done. Some of the supervisors on site even used to use GM workers for personal projects, paying them from the GM payroll; definitely not something that a person in a position of power should be doing and very unethical.

The women had a slightly different outlook on GM and the 1936/1937 strike. On July 15, 1978, K. Gillian was interviewed regarding working conditions and the strike and describes working at GM in that time period as not being able to "call your soul your own." She describes one day in particular where she'd overslept and was in a huge hurry to get to work, so much so that she didn't even have time to eat breakfast, so she bought a candy bar for a nickel on the way to work, assuming that the candy would hold her over until lunch time and noon. By 9:00 A.M., she was feeling hungry and decided to open the candy bar and eat. She quickly learned that this was a huge mistake, because she was almost fired for eating a candy bar on the job.

Frank Funk says that the Sit-Down Strike was nothing less than a "communist weapon." Many people refuse to describe it as such, but he claims that's exactly what it is in an interview with him on June 21, 1979. Before the big Sit-Down Strike, there were two or three strikes of a much smaller caliber throughout the U.S. Until that time, labor and management wouldn't communicate, not until after labor actually left management.

In an interview with Arthur Smith, Smith describes the strike as being very successful. Some of the guys who had been on strike talked about how they "get everything," which in their eyes, made the strike very successful. For workers who were anti-union, pro-union guys would make working life difficult for the anti-union guy until he came around.

James Spohn was interviewed regarding the 1936/1937 strike on June 30, 1980 for the U-M Flint Labor History Project. He describes how after the strike workers went on to work for an hourly wage. All new booths were installed and the grounds were cleaned up for better working conditions. Before, workers had to bathe each night to clean them up and wash away the day's work, and many of them would be coughing up debris. By then, many workers had died from the poor working conditions.

Louis Ganscos says that there was definitely a difference after the strike. Overtime was spread more evenly. Favoritism still occurred, but it wasn't as bad as it had been previously. Things were easing up, but some working conditions didn't change as much as some would have thought.

Robert Gibbs describes being verbally abused for carrying a union card in his pocket. Gibbs was threatened with being fired without pay and was told that he had made a huge mistake signing up with the union while 75 other guys stood lined up outside the front doors to GM looking for jobs.

Original transcripts from the Flint Sit-Down Strike were used to write this essay. The benefits of using transcripts from the Flint Sit-Down Strike are the pure honesty that the workers spoke with. Most of the interviews took place in the 1970s and 1980s, but the strike took place in 1936 and 1937. Hearing and reading about the strike worker's experiences in their own words was very interesting.

The drawbacks of using such transcripts are that they weren't always audible, so important information may have been missed during transcription. The transcripts are not edited, so the information is presented to the reader exactly how it was spoken, which can sometimes be difficult to follow (and understand what the speaker was trying to say).

Most of the history that's discussed by the men and women who worked at the GM plant are memories of personal experiences. There are a lot of negative experiences that are talked about, even though some workers admit to a lot of changes following the strike and that things got better. It seems no one can forget the abuse that occurred on a daily basis.

What was likely left out was the negative stuff that was still occurring even after the strike and everything was getting better. GM undoubtedly became a better place to work, but there were most likely still many individuals who were struggling with the changing work conditions and the better working conditions may not have been right for everyone.

Conclusion

Before the Flint Sit-Down Strike, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) were workers who were isolated and poorly mistreated. The strike turned UAW into a major union, which became the standard for the American automobile industry. Originally formed in 1935, the union decided to stop using piecemeal organizing campaigns in the smaller plants.

The strike made history, because it was the first of its kind and it changed many people's lives for the better. Previously, there had been strikes of a much smaller caliber, but nothing of this magnitude. In 1978, a politic science professor at the University of Michigan-Flint by the name of Neil Leighton attended an academic conference at Duke University. There, Leighton spoke to Professor Laurence Goodwyn, and the two talked about the Flint Sit-Down Strike in great detail and the impact the strike made on history.

Interviews of workers who had been at GM during the strike were conducted between 1978 and 1984. The strike had occurred between 1936 and 1937. By late spring of 2001, Michael Van Dyke and David Bailey of Matrix learned that tapes existed of the interviews from 1978 to 1984. Upon realizing that these interviews were important to American labor history, the tapes were brought to Michigan State University for the purpose of digitizing and transcribing the material.