Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz, “Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, 1936-1937,” Critical Historical Studies 1 (Fall, 2015), 219- 259, (original) (raw)

Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz, “Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, 1936-1937,” Critical Historical Studies 1 (Fall, 2015), 219- 259,

The 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike was a watershed moment in the history of the U.S. labor movement. Intuition might suggest that an explosion of anger and concerted union organizing would have taken place by 1932, when wages and benefits reached the bottom during an extended period of unmediated production increases. Paradoxically, the workers waited, and began their revolt during a time of visible improvement. Accordingly, the Flint sit-down strike is an ideal case study for answering a question that is central to both social movement research and studies on the process of class formation: what are the conditions that are necessary for a group of individuals, who share a common position in the social structure, to collectively rise up and successfully defend their common interests? Our analysis of the Flint strike suggests that four key differences between the early years of the Great Depression and 1936 help to explain the late emergence of collective defiance by labor: 1) the articulation of a moral economy among autoworkers where they came to believe that actions by GM constituted a violation of the traditional effort bargain between workers and management; 2) the organizational flexibility of the UAW in adapting traditional tactics to take advantage of pre-existing social structures 3) the organizational learning that led to the identification of the sit-down strike as a strategy that leveraged the positional power afforded workers by the structure of auto production 4) the incorporation of a class-conscious rank-and-file into the on-the-ground decision making of the UAW.