AFL-CIO

Serious commentators on the labor upheavals of the Depression years seem to agree that disturbances of all kinds, including the wave of sit-down strikes of 1936 and 1937, were caused by the 'speed-up' above all.

Our perspective... was simple: “What will it take to win this strike?”

Minneapolis at the turn of 1934 was one of the major hauling centres of the United States, and the major distribution centre in the Upper Midwest with thousands of truck drivers employed in the city's trucking industry.

The walkout was against cuts in benefits, and run almost entirely by union leaderships. While the supermarkets lost $2.5bn in profits, they succeeded in beating the strike and imposing the cuts.

Notes on Another Defeat for Workers in the US

The First World War was hardly over, it was February 1919, and the leadership of the revolutionary rank-and-file union the Industrial Workers of the World was in jail. However, the IWW idea of the general strike became reality for five days in Seattle, Washington, when a walkout of 100,000 working people brought the city to a halt.