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Title: Aw, Sit Down! Author: Melvin W. Jackson Date: January, 1937 Language: en Topics: factory occupation, France, Germany, strike, unions, United States, work Source: Scanned/OCRed from original Notes: One Big Union Monthly, January, 1937, pages 12–13
“A fantastic situation!” exclaims one weekly voice of American employers
about sit-down strikes.
“We are tired of having to get passes to enter our own factories,” many
French capitalists protest.
Employers become powerless in the face of stay-in or sit-down strikes.
The iron hand that holds the economic life of thousands becomes putty
when confronted by these aroused workers.
The sacred property rights of the industrial tyrant are being
questioned, and the absentee owner trembles lest sit-down strikes become
more popular.
A new era of working-class solidarity is dawning. The slumbering giant
is stirring and testing his chains.
Orthodox unionism is finding itself swept on in the rising tide of
solidarity. Workers are spontaneously realizing they have a weapon more
powerful than any ever dreamed.
Totally unorganized workers are arising in protest against deplorable
conditions and are awakening to the advantages of industrial unionism.
The stay-in strikes in June in France were spontaneous and took the
trade unions by surprise. French trade unions are said to be enjoying an
unprecedented growth due to the overwhelming success of these strikes.
One observer writes, “It can be said roughly that the number of trade
unionists has gone up from 600,000 to 4,400,000 since June. Some
instances: The number of office employees passed from 25,000 to 825,000,
the food workers’ union from 20,000 to 50,000, the Galleries La Fayette,
which had not one single organized worker, now numbers 2,000 of them.
Even the employees of the Banque de France begin to draw up their
demands.”
Two thousand British and Welsh coal miners recently preferred to remain
underground in the mines until their demands were met.
Miners at Pecs, Hungary, likewise declared a “stay-down” strike to wring
concessions from the owners.
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Silesia, India, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico — all
of these countries have witnessed within the past year the solidarity of
workers united in economic direct action. Sit-down strikes, stay-in
strikes, hunger strikes — all these echo a grim determination of
militant workers. Workers who refuse to leave underground mines or who
remain at their factory benches or in their stores and restaurants and
offices while striking — this is the new type of class struggle
confronting capitalism.
Even in Fascist Germany, police and Nazi Storm Troops become powerless
in the face of sit-down strikes, which have occurred in protest against
further wage cuts. The D. K. W. Motor Works at Spandau, and the Motor
Works of Bauer and Schauberte in the Rhineland both witnessed successful
stay-in strikes recently.
American rubber and tire companies, Bendix Aviation, General Electric,
R.C.A., WPA workers in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and elsewhere,
Reading Maid Hosiery, Aluminum Co. of America, New York Shipbuilding
Co., and many other corporations can testify to the efficiency of
sit-down strikes by their lessened profits — and the workers of many of
these places can hold up fatter pay envelopes as mute testimony of their
success.
Violence, rioting, and bloodshed: for years and years these have been
the pet bogeys of union haters. “Terrorism, destruction, and gore” meant
the same thing as “strike” to labor baiters. They dragged these
skeletons out to dangle before the horrified eyes of scissorbills
whenever anyone even whispered “strike” or “solidarity”. “See what will
happen,” employers have exclaimed as they reached for the telephone to
call their tin soldiers or “private detectives” to come and do some
rioting and terrorising for them.
Now, alas and alack, these myths which were so conveniently used by the
bosses are being dispelled.
“Business Week” complains, “Sit-downs were so frequent that the union
set up a system that placed the striking workers in charge of the plant
during disturbances. Men were told off beforehand to guard doors, round
up supervisors ‘for safekeeping in case of trouble’ and generally take
over the plant.”
Order, self-discipline, and responsibility have universally
characterized all sit-down strikes. The employers alone have been
directly responsible for any bloodshed or destruction of property —
because the workers realized that it is not by these tactics that their
strikes are won.
In the recent French sit-down strikes which involved so many industries
it is said the machines were preciously taken care of. The furnaces
which must never go out were kept going; in the tan-yards the skins
remained bathed, and every morning the masons wet the stones of the
houses they were building. In short all work that could not be stopped
without actual damage to valuable materials or machines was kept going
by the strikers.
The workers here demonstrated they can take over and run industries
without the parasitic control by a master-class, and that they can run
them in an orderly and intelligent fashion. This is one thing capitalism
has found itself unable to do: run industry in an orderly and
intelligent fashion.
Where workers have not given politicians control of their strike, the
sit-down strike has been uniformly and universally successful since the
first one — the IWW strike of 3,000 General Electric employees in 1906.
The fact that the ownership of an industry belongs to the workers in
that industry, just as the toothbrush he uses should belong to him; the
fact that a worker has just as definite a right to the job upon which
his economic life depends as he has upon his hair; the fact that the
rights of the parasitic class should not include the ownership of tools
they never use but upon which others’ lives depends — these facts are
all understood by a sit-down striker, though he may not recognize them
as such.
The worker at his machine which he refuses either to leave or to operate
until his demands are granted, and the factory which continues to be
operated by strikers, declare the worker’s right to his machine, and his
ability to run it when the shackles of capitalist ownership are shaken
off, though at the time it be only temporary.
Where economic direct action and working class solidarity are used in
struggles against the master class, the workers will never lose.
“Freedom cannot be gained through intermediaries.”