Sit-down Strike

A sit-down strike is a labour strike and a form of civil disobedience in which an organized group of workers, usually employed at factories or other centralized locations, take unauthorized or illegal possession of the workplace by "sitting down" at their stations.

The attraction of the tactic is that it prevents employers from replacing them with strikebreakers or removing equipment to transfer production to other locations. Neal Ascherson has commented that an additional attraction is that it emphasizes the role of workers in providing for the people and allows workers to in effect hold valuable machinery hostage as a bargaining chip.

History

Workers have used the technique since the beginning of the 20th century in countries such as United States, Italy, Poland, Croatia, and France. The United Auto Workers staged successful sit-down strikes in the 1930s, most famously in the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937. In Flint, Michigan, strikers occupied several General Motors plants for more than forty days, and repelled the efforts of the police and National Guard to retake them. A wave of sit-down strikes followed but diminished by the end of the decade as the courts and the National Labor Relations Board held that sit-down strike