One Year After Republic: Workers’ Hidden Sit-Down Strike Tradition

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5339/one_year_after_republic_workers_hidden_sit-down_strike_tradition/

Friday December 18 9:03 am

This is the first of a two-part series marking the one-year anniversary of the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation.

By Roger Bybee

The Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation staged by the United Electrical union workers in Chicago one year ago attracted worldwide attention in some 4,000 articles.

The six-day sit-down was widely viewed as an extrordinarily mlitant response by U.S. workers who faced an imminent plant closing, the refusal of the freshly bailed-out Bank of America to extend a loan to Republic, and the overall economic crisis. With President-Elect Barack Obama expressing support ("I think they’re absolutely right” ), the illegal action gained an unusual degree of legitimacy.

While there have only been about a half-dozen or so U.S. plant seizures in recent decades, the Republic sit-down is actually part of a subterranean tradition of factory seizures in the U.S., which have persisted in the post-WWII era. Workplace occupations were central to winning industrial union recognition in the 1930s in the U.S., but sit-down strikes had virtually disappeared in the U.S. following a harsh Supreme Court anti-sitdown ruling in the 1939 Fansteel case, unions' WWII no-strike policy, and the post-war Red Scare targeting of labor left-wingers.

"The Fansteel decision essentially stopped sit-downs," observes University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee laborhistorian Steve Meyer, author of Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control. "My guess is, shop floor subversion or slowdowns became a major form to exert pressure after the Supreme Court decision, because they were covert and difficult to detect."

Sit-down actions have continued to be more frequent in Europe over the past four decades, with dozens occurring since 2008's economic meltdown. The few U.S. factory occupations that have occurred in recent decades have reflected an adapting labor movement's embrace of more militant and creative tactics re-taught to unions by other social movements.

BACK TO OVERT DEFIANCE

Overt sit-down tactics were re-kindled by the civil rights movement and the Free Speech movement at UC-Berkeley in the 1960s, and soon spread widely across urban centers and campuses, as detailed by historian Nelson Lichtenstein of UC-Santa Barbara, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit.

FULL story at link.