On December 30, 1936, workers occupied General Motors' Fisher Body Plants No. 1 and No. 2 in Flint, Michigan. By March 12, 1937, General Motors (GM; the United States' largest industrial corporation with vast financial resources and a network of anti-union spies) was forced to capitulate and sign a contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW). This was the beginning of a flood of strikes that brought unionization to the mass-production industries of the United States, at a time of both high unemployment (i.e., weak market-based bargaining power) and feeble labor organization (i.e., weak associational power).

A key to the UAW's success was labor's workplace bargaining power: the ability of the workers to exploit their position within the complex division of labor characteristic of mass production. The Flint sit-down strike that paralyzed GM's Fisher Body plant was planned and executed by a "militant minority" of autoworkers who by "unexpectedly stopping the assembly line and sitting down inside the plant ...catalyzed pro-union sentiment among the vast majority of apathetic workers" (Dubofsky and Va n Tine 1977: 255). The strike wave demonstrated the limits of the assembly lines' technical control of the workforce: a relatively small number of activists could bring an entire plant's production to a halt. As Edwards (1979: 128) put it, "[technical] control linked the entire plant's workforce, and when the line stopped, every worker necessarily joined the strike."