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Thanks to Reynolds’s ingenuity as a mediator and the city council’s eagerness to end the confrontation, a deal was finally reached. Unlike Loeb, the council agreed to bargain with the sanitation workers’ union and allow a dues checkoff. The council said the city was too financially strapped to gran…

echoed GM's truculent stance

In the fall of 1945, just weeks after the war ended, Reuther was pushing two highly ambitious bargaining demands that he hoped would chart a course for postwar industrial America. First, he sought a 30 percent raise for the UAW’s 175,000 members at GM (equivalent to thirty-three cents an hour). GM’…

Workers at the Goodyear tire plant in Akron, Ohio, had conducted several sit-down strikes in the spring of 1936, while French workers had staged a huge wave of such protests that May and June. The sit-down had many advantages over traditional strikes. In typical strikes, workers trudged back and fo…

The day of the settlement, the sit-downers marched triumphantly out of the Flint plants, proud that they were not vacating under a sheriff’s order. Thousands of supporters cheered them as the strikers sang “Solidarity Forever.” Outside the plant hung a fifty-foot banner proclaiming, “VICTORY IS OUR…