American Decades
The Sit-Down Strike in the 1930s
Background.
The New Deal climate of the 1930s gave industrial workers an unprecedented chance to improve their conditions by organizing into unions. Led by powerful labor leader John L. Lewis, the Committee for Industrial Organizations (CIO) was created in 1935 to give the nation's thirty million nonskilled workers a chance to unionize. A major new weapon in organizing workers and fighting for better conditions was the sit-down strike. Prior to the sit-down strike, unions could only overcome the fears and suspicions of workers by mounting a success fill strike. Strikes, however, often erupted in violence and were rarely successful unless a majority of the workers supported the effort.
Passive Resistance.
Sit-down strikes enabled a small number of workers to stop the production of an entire company by taking physical possession of the plant and its machines. By occupying a single strategic area of a plant, strikers...
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1930's Business and the Economy
