Issue 191 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published November 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review

Genora (Johnson) Dollinger died on 11 October in the US, at the age of 82. Dollinger became a socialist at 16 and was an organiser of the US Socialist Party. She played a leading role in the General Motors 1936-7 sitdown strikes that launched the United Auto Workers' Union and the Congress of Industrial Organisations. Susan Rosenthal interviewed her last February.

'The conditions in Flint before the strike were very, very depressing for working people. The speed-up was the biggest issue. They had men with watches timing the workers to see if they could get one or two more operations in. There were several cases of men just cracking up completely and taking a wrench and going after the foremen. These men were sentenced to an insane asylum.

'Black men were taken only in the foundry of Buick and as sanitation workers, cleaning up the men's toilets in the other plants. Black men had no hope of ever getting a rise or promotion. In one department of A C Sparkplug the girls had been forced to go to the county hospital to be treated for venereal disease traced to one foreman. Those were the conditions that young women had to accept to support their families.

'They used to say, "Once you pass the gates of General Motors, forget about the US Constitution". If a foreman didn't like you he could fire you. And many foremen expected workers to bring them turkeys on Thanksgiving and gifts for Christmas and repair their cars and even paint their houses in order to keep their jobs. You can see what a feeling of slavery and domination the men felt inside of the plant.

'There was a lot of preparatory work before the strike by radical parties. Two years before the strike broke out the Socialist Party organised the League for Industrial Democracy in Flint. We held meetings in garages and in basements, lectures in socialism mainly, and labour history and current events. Our newspaper, The Socialist Call, was distributed widely as an aid to our recruitment of GM workers into the Socialist Party. So that the first people who took the initial brave actions in the shop were primarily Socialist Party workers.

'The sitdowns took place the last days of December. I was amazed at the number of wives who came down and threatened their husbands that if they didn't cut out that foolishness and get out of that plant right now they would be divorced men. We thought that if the women can be that effective in breaking a strike, they can be just as effective in helping them win a strike. So we organised the women's auxiliary, which was very effective at involving the women in the strike.

'Then the company decided they had to break the strike from inside. They prevented the men from having any food, they turned off the heat and then they sent the police in to shoot teargas inside the plant. They also started shooting and teargassing this huge mass of picketers that had formed outside. The union picketers took their cars and made barricades so the police couldn't get us from both ends.

'Finally, I got up in the sound truck and I called the police, "Cowards, cowards, shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing into the mothers of children". And everything became quiet on both sides of the line. And I appealed to the women, the spectators on both sides, "Break through those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts". In the dusk, I could barely see one woman walking down the battle zone. And as soon as that happened there were other women who followed down, then more men. And there was a big roar of victory.

'From that night, I decided that women could form an emergency brigade and every time there was a threatened battle, we could make a difference. The women's emergency brigade became a very dramatic thing and it made the front page of the New York Times. Everybody wanted to join the union. We would get calls all the time.

'Following the strike the auto worker became a different human being. And the women who had participated became a different type of woman, a different type than we have ever known anywhere in the labour movement and certainly in the city of Flint. They carried themselves with a different walk, their heads were high and they had confidence in themselves.

'Also the relationships within the family became much, much stronger. The kids understood why their parents were leaving them so often and why they had to get through a period of deprivation. Among the working class it was a lot better. And inside the factory the foremen were tiptoeing around. Every time something came up that couldn't be settled, the workers shut the line down. These men were not afraid of the boss anymore.

'After GM workers organised, Chrysler followed, then Ford, then the rubber workers, then the glass workers, then steel was organised. And all these formed the Congress of Industrial Organisations. These initials, CIO, stood for power. You'd see posters in homes and on cars, "I am the CIO". I've never known of anything else as powerful. We even organised the unemployed, which is the hardest thing in the world.

'After the strike, a bureaucracy developed that didn't want radicals giving the workers the real solution to the problems of people in general, and working class people especially, in our country or any other country--socialism, social ownership of the means of production and distributing the wealth equally so there would be no ruling class dominating one section of humanity.

'I think that our duty today is to educate all of those who do not understand where they got their present benefits from--organised labour. People were shot and killed for their labour beliefs. We have to give them a history of the labour movement and the role that women played.'