Five days later the company union gave the RCA workers the chance they had been looking for. Long understood to be the veiled voice of the company, the ECU posted inflammatory notices against the new UE organization, and the union leadership seized the opportunity to put heat on management by calling a sit-down strike, which they claimed shut down 80 percent of production. After only five hours, however, the union called off the strike when RCA agreed to state that it did not endorse the notices put up by the ECU, that all acts of intimidation by foremen (including forcing employees to attend ECU meetings) would end, and that the company would commence negotiations immediately. Union officials later regretted giving up control of the plant, as it soon became clear that the company only wanted to get the workers out of the factory in order to have more time to prepare for the strike. The next morning, as scores of guards took their posts at strategic points to detect and report labor unrest, the plant looked like occupied territory.