As part of the May 1937 strike, the miners assembled an underground band. These subterranean troubadors

One might wonder, why don’t workers use sit-down strikes today? As I pointed out in an earlier post, sit-down strikes were an extremely effective way for workers to gain leverage at the point of production and win concessions.  Yet today strikes are quite rare and sit-downs are nearly non-existent in the U.S.

The reason for this is clear.  Attorney James Pope notes in his article, Worker Lawmaking, Sit-Down Strikes, and the Shaping of American Industrial Relations, 1935-1958,:

“…the United States Supreme Court issued its (1939) opinion in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, resolving the official legal status of the tactic. Fansteel made it clear not only that a state could punish sit-downers for violating trespass laws, but also that an employer could lawfully discharge them.”

Essentially the Court ruled that the company’s property rights trumped the human rights of the workers.

Back in Wilsonville, IL, the PMA national leadership presaged the Supreme Court decision.  In the May 21, 1937 edition of The Progressive Miner, the union leadership admonished the Wilsonville strikers:

“The use of the ‘sit-down’ weapon is so far from the American way of doing business that it is not even funny; it incorporates the elements of confiscation of property, and is an abuse of liberty.  It is true that the operators of industries are not above stretching the point here and there when the occasion arises, but that does not constitute a justification for absolute and vicious violations of constitutional right by labor.”

Yet the objections of the PMA leadership were inconsequential as far as the striking miners were concerned.  Further embarrassing PMA President Joe Ozanic, Local 1 received support from an unlikely source.  On May 23, 1937, the Illinois State Register reported:

“Promise of financial assistance from the C.I.O. went down to between three hundred and five hundred striking Progressive Miners tonight as they held their places at the bottom of the Superior Coal Co’s No. 4 mine at Wilsonville after three successive conferences failed to effect a settlement.

Offer of aid came from leaders of a group of John L. Lewis’ Committee for Industrial Organizations who came here this afternoon to talk with strike leaders and mingle with hundreds of strike sympathizers who gathered around the Wilsonville shaft.

Joe Ozanic, president of the Progressive Miners of America, was in Cincinnati to apply for a charter for the organization in the American Federation of Labor.”

Internal and external conflicts aside, day to day life underground had its humorous side too.  Jack Battuello recalled:

“It was during that sit-down about the third or fourth day when …we took a head count and come up one man short… We sent out search parties…We searched under the cars.  We search under the rocks.  We searched everywhere … And we were almost frantic.  I was particularly hysterical about it because I didn’t want to lose a man.  It would hurt our cause, our sit-down strike.

… And I looked down and I saw a light.  A little old dim light coming from the air shaft direction.  And I knew instantly that was our missing man … I walked up to him and I recognized him.  It was Dominic Bollestra.  And I was mad and angry…And I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him and I said, ‘Goddamn you son-of-a-bitch where in the hell have you been for the last 4 or 5 hours?.’…

He looked at me very calmly and said, ‘What kind of a son-of-a-bitchin’ union have you got here?  I sent a note up to my wife to meet me in the air shaft and make love,’ he said.  ‘And now you say the union says I can’t make love?’  He says, ‘I sit down here!  I’m no scab!  And now you tell me I can’t make love with my wife.  What the hell kind of a union do you got?’

So I laughed too.  And I was just sorry that I hadn’t made such an arrangement with my wife.”

However, the mine manager continued to reject the miners’ demands.  And after nine days, the strike ended.  On May 29, 1937, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported:

More than 350 coal miners who had occupied the Superior Coal Co. No. 4 mine at nearby Wilsonville 200 hours came to the surface last night, ending a ‘stay-down’ called in support of a share-the-work plan.

John Fisher, president of the Gillespie local, Progressive Miners of America, led a large group of the striking miners to the surface without advance notice shortly after 10 p.m. and announced:…

‘We are justified in saying the stay-down strike has accomplished its primary purpose…. it has dramatically promoted national attention to the fact that miners are paying the cost of mechanization in terms of less work, less pay, fewer jobs.

‘Our immediate strike is merely a rehearsal of a greater struggle that looms in the coal industry on the issue of mechanization and consequent effects on the lives of the people who depend on mining.  Unless greater social and economic reforms are enacted to give the miners a greater share of the benefits of mechanization, labor action will manifest itself with greater intensity and on a broader scale.

‘Our stay-down strike now terminates, but the struggle to meet mechanization goes on, and we call upon the miners of America to join us in this demand for the six-hour day as the first step to meet the problem.”

Today direct action tactics like sit-down strikes are rare, but they aren’t yet extinct in the U.S. labor movement.  One need only review Kari Lyderson’s excellent book, Revolt On Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover, and What it Says About the Economic Crisis. Lyderson details the 2008 struggle against Republic Windows and Doors and the Bank of America.  Spearheaded by the feisty, democratic and independent  United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE),  the factory occupation garnered international support, media attention and a victory for the workers.

Sit-down strikes and other forms of direct action offer the opportunity for workers to create immediate leverage in the work place, thus preventing labor disputes from being subject to endless legal and bureaucratic processes that seem increasingly compromised in favor of the wealthy.  As the avenues for administrative solutions continue to be constrained, the need for labor to deploy creative direct-action responses may be a necessary remedy if workers are to reassert the primacy of human rights in the workplace.

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