General Motors Capitulates to UAW After 44-Day Flint Sit-Down Strike, Recognizing Union in Historic Labor Victory

On February 11, 1937, General Motors—the world’s largest industrial corporation—capitulates to the UAW after 44 days of sit-down strikes, signing a one-page agreement that recognizes the United Auto Workers as exclusive bargaining representative for union members for six months and grantsstrikers’ core demands. GM President Alfred Sloan offers a $25 million wage increase and promises workers the right to join unions without fear of retaliation, rehiring all strike participants and allowing union buttons and symbols in plants. The agreement permits six months of negotiations in plants that participated in the strike, establishing the UAW’s legitimacy as bargaining agent for autoworkers. The victory comes after strikers withstood corporate violence (the January 11 “Battle of the Running Bulls”), harsh winter conditions in unheated occupied plants, tear gas attacks, injunctions from GM-friendly judges (including Judge Edward S. Black who owned 3,000 GM shares and was later disbarred), and intense pressure to abandon the occupation.

The Flint strike—“the strike heard round the world”—transforms American labor relations and the UAW itself, changing the union from a collection of isolated local organizations on the industry’s fringes into a major force representing autoworkers across the nation. UAW membership explodes from 30,000 before the strike to 500,000 within one year, as the entire automobile industry rapidly unionizes in the strike’s wake. Union membership nationwide balloons from 3.4 million workers in 1930 to 10 million by 1942, with autoworkers leading the industrial union movement that establishes middle-class wages and benefits previously unimaginable for manufacturing workers. The sit-down tactic proves devastatingly effective because occupying plants prevents strikebreaker replacement and production relocation, giving workers leverage despite lacking financial resources for extended walkouts.

The GM settlement represents a watershed moment demonstrating that coordinated worker action can force even the most powerful corporations to recognize collective bargaining rights, inspiring similar organizing drives across American industry. The strike’s success results from multiple factors: militant worker solidarity, innovative sit-down tactics, the Women’s Emergency Brigade’s crucial support, sympathetic Michigan Governor Frank Murphy’s protective National Guard deployment, and UAW strategic focus on GM’s most valuable Flint plants as production chokepoints. However, corporate America’s defeat in Flint intensifies business resistance to labor organizing, leading to continued violence against unions (Ford’s 1937 “Battle of the Overpass”), decades of legal warfare to weaken the Wagner Act, and eventual systematic dismantling of union power through Taft-Hartley (1947), permanent striker replacement (1980s), state-level right-to-work campaigns (2010s), and Supreme Court decisions like Janus (2018). The Flint victory’s long-term erosion illustrates how corporate interests coordinate patient multi-decade campaigns to reverse democratic gains threatening profit maximization.