The Local 9 generation: the thousand who sat down

1936 – 2016

The sit-downers of Bendix, November 1936: this entry belongs to a body of people the record mostly holds collectively, and it prints them at that size honestly. When the company ordered all workers outside, to decide whether they wished to work, the men determined to remain in the plant until management came to terms. About a thousand workers held the plant — eight days by the Businesses section's count, a week by Seidman's, nine days by the Michigan Daily's editorial arithmetic; the variants stand in the record. Order and discipline were maintained inside; members were fed, shows were put on, parades and religious services held. The settlement granted the main demands, and the strikers paraded through South Bend's business section headed by the effigy of the Bendix company union hanging on a long pole. It was the first strike in which American automobile workers stayed in the plant overnight — the first UAW sit-down in an auto plant — and the tactic went from South Bend to Flint within weeks. The individual names of the thousand are not in the sources read for this section; the local they built, UAW Local 9, is their monument, and Studebaker's workers joined the same young union in the same organizing wave.

The local's long life: the Bendix plant passed in time to Honeywell, and Local 9 held it into the twenty-first century. On 9 May 2016 Honeywell locked out its South Bend workforce — about 340 Local 9 members — after the membership voted down a proposed contract 270 to 30, and the lockout ran through the year with solidarity delegations arriving from Detroit and Chicago locals, as they had in spirit in 1936. The locked-out workers' own words carry the lineage the record gives: "My grandfather was there when the union first started in 1936. My dad has been there for twenty years," said Brandon Bullerman, then a 20-year-old Honeywell worker; Local 9's president in the lockout was Adam Stevenson. A grandson on the picket line of the local his grandfather founded is the People record's measure of what the thousand of 1936 built: eighty years, three generations, one local.

Sources:

2. The Michigan Daily, 18 December 1936 — the nine days of self-incarceration, the demands granted, and the strike's place in the movement's rejuvenation.
3. Workers World (January 2017), on the Honeywell lockout — the dates 17–23 November 1936, the discipline and services inside the plant, and "Bendix Local 9 had won a tremendous victory."
4. Payday Report (May–August 2016) — the 9 May 2016 lockout of about 340 members, the 270-to-30 contract vote, Local 9 president Adam Stevenson, and Brandon Bullerman's three-generation statement.
5. Naked Capitalism (February 2017), Toni Gilpin — the Honeywell succession at the plant, the February rally at the UAW hall on Main Street, and the Studebaker workers' place in the same organizing wave.