Sit-down Strike

Why Inside the Factory Rather than Outside?

The weakness of the traditional strike stands at the factory gate: the moment workers walk out, the employer can bring in replacements, and the strikers clash with police trying to stop them by picketing. Occupation inverts the problem. As long as workers stay beside the machines, the plant can be neither run nor cleared, and removing them means the state must bear the burden of sending force onto private property. At the same time, by guarding machines and stock, the occupiers neutralize the old charge of sabotage. In the occupied French factories of 1936, discipline was kept by strike committees, alcohol was banned, and the machinery was often kept cleaner than before the strike.

There was also a dimension beyond institutional demands: the experience of walking on one's own feet through the place where one works, holding dances on the shop floor, organizing the day without orders. Simone Weil, who had worked at Renault, wrote of the June 1936 occupations as 'pure joy', and historians count this festive character among the tactic's most distinctive records.

1936, Two Countries

In France, occupation began at the Bréguet plant in Le Havre in May 1936 and exploded to the point where 8,941 of June's 12,142 strikes involved occupation, extracting the Matignon Agreements and the legislation of paid holidays and the 40-hour week. The Blum government refused to clear the factories despite employers' protests that occupation was a plain violation of property; the premier himself told parliament he would enforce the law, but 'not with blood'.

That December, GM workers in Flint, Michigan occupied their plants with the same tactic. After 44 days, GM recognized the United Auto Workers in February 1937, and the sit-down strike became the springboard of the CIO's industrial unionism. But in 1939 the US Supreme Court's Fansteel ruling fixed the sit-down strike as illegal, and French case law likewise treated occupation as a violation of property. That the tactic's power comes from outside legality has not changed since.

Where Did It Lead?

The lineage runs both ways. The precedent was the Italian occupation of the factories of September 1920, when 400,000 metalworkers seized their plants in the north and some kept production running; Gramsci's theory of factory councils came out of that experience. After 1936, much of the ten-million-strong general strike of May 1968 in France again took the form of occupation, and the same tactic revived in the Korean and Polish labour movements of the 1970s and 1980s and at the Republic Windows factory in Chicago in 2008. The strike that does not leave the workplace remains the most direct form in which workers show who actually moves the means of production.