The sit down stirke of 1936 to 1937

From Detroit Bureau Chief Ed Garsten

FLINT, Michigan (CNN) -- To understand why the United Auto Workers' strike against two General Motors parts plants -- now in its second month -- has been so hard to settle, you have to go back more than 60 years.

The UAW, then a fledgling union, began what is now known in the history of organized labor as the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-37.

Workers at GM's Fisher Body plant held a sit-down protest inside the plant that lasted 44 days and led to the UAW's first contract with GM.

Working conditions at the time were deplorable, says Robert Keith, 90, one of the surviving sit-down strikers. ( 94 K/8 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

The MIchigan National Guard set up a machine gun near the plant

Larry Huber, another sit-downer, was a teen-ager at the time and faked his working papers to get a job at GM. "We were going to hold that plant until they recognized us as a union," he told CNN.

Before long, GM turned up the heat in the wintertime strike by shutting it off. Electricity to the plant was cut. Workers' wives smuggled in food and the National Guard was sent in.

"They set the machine guns right in the middle of the street on Chevrolet Avenue and you couldn't go by them," recalls Huber. "This was just to show authority."

On February 11, 1937, the workers finally prevailed and got what they wanted -- a contract agreement and respect.

"The result," says Wayne State University archivist Mike Smith," was a one-page contract between GM and the UAW. In essence this contract said that GM recognized the UAW as the official bargaining agent for the workers.

The legacy of the sit-down strike 62 years ago hasn't died in Flint where workers still hang on to that same kind of militancy fueling the current walkout against GM.

"The people of Flint are more militant not just because of a historical legacy," says Smith, "but because of the loss of 40,000 UAW jobs -- GM jobs, largely speaking -- in Flint over last 15, 20 years."

Indeed, even at 90, Keith is still fighting the car companies philosophically, if not physically. Industry talk about being competitive is code for "slave labor," he says. ( 85 K/7 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

If Keith and Huber were active autoworkers today, both say they would be just as willing to make a stand -- by sitting down.

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