1. Lowell Mill Women’s Strikes (1834 and 1836)
Some of America’s earliest labor strikes, the Lowell Mill women’s strikes bear more than passing similarity to contemporary events. A booming economy led to plentiful jobs with higher wages. When the economy cooled, capital imposed a 15 percent wage cut at the Lowell mills. There wasn’t even a word for “strike” yet, but the overwhelmingly female workforce did just that. The first strike in 1834 failed, with women heading out of town or returning to work at poverty wages.
While the 1834 strike failed, women learned lessons from the bitter, pitched battle in the streets of Lowell, MA. By 1836, the economy degraded further. A rent increase at company boardinghouses acted as the spark to the powder keg. Women formed the Factory Girls’ Association to lead another strike. The second strike lasted several weeks, ending with a victory for the mill workers.
The significance of the Lowell Mill Strike of 1836 lies beyond merely defeating a rent hike. The strike won broad community support, a strategy essential at winning strikes. It was also the first time a woman spoke in public in Lowell. The strike stands as an early example of the power of organized labor, and offers lessons for how labor can draw in the broader community. Finally, the organized withdrawal of funds from local banks finds echoes in today’s “Move Your Money” movement, where people withdraw money from corporate banks, moving them to community banks and credit unions
3. The Pullman Strike (1894)
The Pullman Strike would have been another unremarkable strike of the Gilded Age except for a few things. First, the American Railway Union (ARU) led it. Second, the ARU’s leader was a labor militant named Eugene Victor Debs.
The strike began as a protest against wage cuts and 16-hour days. The ARU supported the strike, with many of its members participating directly. ARU workers boycotted Pullman cars, threatening a national strike if rail workers were disciplined for the boycott. Over 100,000 workers walked out, with an intensive campaign of strikebreaking on the part of the Pullman Company. Pullman preferred black labor for this task, capitalizing on the racism frequently employed by ARU. President Grover Cleveland sent out U.S. Marshals and the army to break the strike.
Debs got six months in prison for ignoring a court injunction against the strike. During his time in jail he read Karl Marx and became a socialist, setting the stage for five presidential runs between 1900 and 1920. Cleveland and Congress passed a Labor Day law six days after the strike’s end. The strike further underscored the necessity of linking black and white labor for victory.
4. The Bonus Army War (1932)
During the dying days of the Hoover administration, life in America was tough. Thus, with record unemployment, the Bonus Army organized. Seeking to collect an early payment on a promised World War I bonus, the Bonus Army massed on Capitol Hill on June 17, 1932, building semi-permanent camps with garbage pulled from a nearby junkyard.
Hoover sent the army to violently disperse the Bonus Army, an act that, while successful, sealed the president’s electoral fate. When the army reconvened, in May 1933, Roosevelt gave them a place to camp and three meals per day, leading to the famous quip “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.” The new president later allowed exemptions from Civilian Conservation Corps rules for W.W. I veterans. Congress overrode Roosevelt’s veto in 1936 to allow World War I veterans to collect their bonus early.
The Bonus Army stands as an early example of veterans organizing around veterans’ issues. Beyond merely finalizing the foregone conclusion of a single-term Hoover administration or providing greater access to the CCC, the Bonus Army inspired major labor battles of the next several years. The members showed that movements for social justice could succeed, even in the face of violent repression.
5. Auto-Lite Strike (1934)
The strike against Electric Auto-Lite in Toledo, Ohio, was the first of a triumvirate of strikes in 1934 that forged a new American labor left. After passage of the National Labor Relations Act, union membership swelled. Still, the American Federation of Labor stuck to craft unionism, the principle that unions should be organized by trade, rather than by industry. This made organizing areas like the auto industry difficult. The AFL authorized “federal labor unions,” temporary, cross-union organizations designed to win limited concessions around specific strikes. Auto-Lite workers, organized around FLU 18384 walked out, demanding recognition of their union and a 10 percent increase in wages. Employers met halfway, giving a 5 percent wage increase and offering negotiations later this year. When a contract failed to materialize, workers walked out.
The American Workers Party, a mass working-class party led by Dutch Marxist minister A.J. Muste, organized the unemployed to prevent strikebreaking. A little over a month into the strike, demonstrations numbered over 10,000. Sheriff’s deputies began making arrests and beat an elderly worker. Open street fighting erupted between police and strikers, leading to workers seizing a fire hose and turning it back on police. When police began using tear and vomit gas, striking workers attacked the Auto-Lite plant with bricks and stones, burned police cars and appropriated the inner tubes as slingshots. While Auto-Lite picketers battled police, 51 out of 103 union locals voted in favor of a general strike.
By the end of the week, violence and street battles died down. While the strike ultimately secured relatively modest reforms -- recognition, an additional 5 percent wage increase and a minimum wage of 35 cents per hour -- it led to intense unionization in the city. Toledo, OH remains one of the most unionized cities in America today.
8. Flint Sit-Down Strike (1936)
An aftershock to the three great strikes of the 1930s, the Flint Sit-Down Strike set new benchmarks for labor militancy in the United States. When the UAW picked a fight with GM in Flint, it had its work cut out for them. Flint was a company town and GM kept spies in the plants to prevent unionization.
Taking inspiration from the European workers’ movement, American workers no longer felt content with pickets. Instead, they occupied the factories, making bringing in strikebreakers as dangerous as entering a hornet’s nest. Faced with a tough fight in Flint, UAW workers occupied the factory, electing their own officials and organizing food deliveries. When the police attempted to turn a firehouse on the strikers, the workers seized the hose and turned it on the police -- in the middle of a Michigan January. When cops attempted to retake the factory with tear gas, the strikers’ wives threw rocks through the windows, keeping the tear gas from collecting in the building.
The strike finally succeeded in 1937, giving the UAW a massive boost in legitimacy. Over 100,000 GM workers joined the UAW on the heels of the strike, with the UAW’s ranks increasing from 30,000 to 500,000 in the course of a year. Future UAW president Walter Reuther made his bones in the Flint Sit-Down Strike, known as “the strike heard ‘round the world.”
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