The Bendix sit-down · nine days, or six, that started an era

17–25 NOVEMBER 1936

On the morning of 17 November 1936, the sit-down strike came to the automobile industry in South Bend: Workers in several departments of the Bendix Products plant stopped work and stayed at their machines. About a thousand workers stayed inside — the figure the Businesses section of this history prints, and the figure labour's own press carries; one scholarly history of the sit-downs puts the number at 1,500, and that figure is printed here as the conflict it is. The occupiers were members of UAW Local 9, chartered in 1933 as an AFL federal labour union, and their demand was recognition: that the union, and not the company's own Bendix Employees Association, bargain for the plant.

Even the length of the occupation is disputed by the record, and the dispute is printed rather than settled: The finding aid to Local 9's own records at the Reuther Library says the workers stayed in the plant for six days. The History Museum in South Bend says seven days, and dates the agreement to 25 November. Labour Notes, the labour movement's own paper, says the occupation lasted eight days. Jeremy Brecher's history of the sit-downs says nine, and the contemporary Michigan Daily, reporting on 18 December 1936, described "nine days of self-incarceration" before the crowd of strikers pushed jubilantly out through the gates to their wives and children — "three weeks ago Wednesday," which is 25 November. Counting the 17th, the 25th is the ninth day; counting working days, or days after the first, gives the shorter figures. What every account agrees on is the result: the Bendix Employees Association was eliminated as a bargaining rival, and Local 9 became the single authorized bargaining agent for Bendix Products in South Bend.

The event's standing is not in dispute: Seidman, writing in 1937, called it "the first strike in which automobile workers stayed in the plant overnight" — rubber workers in Akron had sat down before, but no automobile workers had held a plant through the night until Bendix. The tactic spread within days: Detroit's Midland Steel workers sat down on 27 November, Kelsey-Hayes followed in December, and on 30 December 1936 the Flint sit-down began — the forty-four-day occupation that forced General Motors to terms and made the UAW. The wave that reorganized American industry began, by the record, in a brake plant in South Bend. The labour story in full — the local, the later strikes, the ground's passage from Bendix to Bosch to Honeywell — is carried in Businesses and People; what belongs here is the week itself, and the fact that it started here.

Sources:

1. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, finding aid to the UAW Local 9 Records — the local's charter in 1933 as AFL Federal Labor Union No. 18347; "November 17, 1936 brought the first sit down strike in the auto industry to Local 9"; the workers in the plant for six days; the Bendix Employees Association denied the right to bargain and eliminated; Local 9 the single authorized bargaining agent.
2. "Sit-Down" (League for Industrial Democracy, 1937) — the contemporary account: the stoppage of 17 November, the company's order to assemble outside, the decision to remain against the lockout, "in a week victory was won," and Bendix as "the first strike in which automobile workers stayed in the plant over night."
3. The History Museum, South Bend, "Bendix Sit-Down Strike" — the morning of 17 November 1936, seven days in the closed plant, agreement reached 25 November. (The Museum's further claim that it was the longest strike in United States history to that date is not carried: strikes of months and years long precede 1936 in the documented record.)
4. Labor Notes (2017), "At the Birthplace of Auto Workers' Sit-Down Strikes" — a thousand workers, an eight-day occupation, "the first U.S. auto plant to employ the sit-down tactic," with the paper's own correction narrowing the claim to the first in a U.S. auto plant.
5. Jeremy Brecher, Strike!, and the Michigan Daily of 18 December 1936 (Bentley Historical Library) — the nine-day figure, the contemporary paper's "nine days of self-incarceration" and the crowd at the gates; Sidney Fine's history, excerpted in the Ross collection at Georgia State University — "the sevenday sitdown by 1,500 workers at the Bendix Products plant."