![]() ![]() The strikers then said they would occupy the store until their demands were met. The manager hemmed and hawed, but promised nothing. The strikers gave the manager a list of demands: union recognition, a 10-cent per hour raise over their current 25 cents, an eight-hour workday, time-and-a-half after 48 hours per week, 50-cent lunches for the food counter workers, free uniforms and laundering, seniority rights, hiring of new workers only through a union hiring hall, and no retaliation. All the women, plus the stock boys, were ushered into a conference room. Within minutes the store’s manager appeared. Then they moved quickly through the whole store, and soon almost all the women workers on all three sales floors had stepped back from their counters or rushed out from the kitchen, folded their arms, and stopped working.”Īccording to the Detroit News, “The jangle of cash registers stopped, and bewildered customers found themselves holding out nickels and dimes in vain… not a girl tried to wait on a customer.” First the women in the white uniforms at the food counter stopped working. “Voices shouted out and cheers rose from different parts of the store. And then “Floyd Loew, an organizer with the Waiters’ and Waitresses’ Union of Detroit, strode to the very center of the store’s first floor… blew a screeching whistle as loud as he could and yelled ‘STRIKE! STRIKE!’ - or by some reports, ‘STRIKE, GIRLS, STRIKE!’ The young women in the Detroit Woolworth’s undoubtedly had their meager paychecks and the victory at Flint on their minds that Saturday morning. “ I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store.” ![]() “We must have cheap help or we cannot sell cheap goods.”īing Crosby provided a counterpoint with one of his hit songs. ![]() Frank Woolworth, the company’s founder, had put it bluntly: The women who staffed the store knew their place in the scheme of things. There, shoppers who were white could indulge in a banana split at the lunch counter.” “The more intrepid could follow arrows luring them down into the basement sales level, complete with canaries. Inside Woolworth’s was “a vast array of small, low-priced goods: hair combs, knitting needles, lampshades, safety pins, pie plates, face creams, and crisp new shoelaces folded into little packets, with paper bands around their middles specifying their length… Tidily printed signs poked up from displays throughout the store to reassure customers that almost all the goods splayed out in flat, tray-like counters at waist level cost only five or ten cents, just as the store’s name promised… Auto workers flooded into the UAW, helping to propel it and the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to even greater victories. In the end, General Motors capitulated and recognized the then-fledgling United Auto Workers (UAW). The workers had received so much sympathy and support that the governor actually sent in the National Guard to protect the strikers from the police. It was in fact an "extraordinary moment in history." “Like all Woolworth’s stores, this one was painted with red and green trim, with the chain’s name out front in big bold letters,” displaying the company’s corporate brand identity in a way that was new at the time, though omnipresent today.īut it was not the “most ordinary of Saturdays.” General Motors auto workers in Flint, only a few miles north of Detroit, had won a historic victory just days earlier, after occupying their factory for several weeks, ignoring court orders to leave, and fighting off police assaults. “It was February 27, 1937, at Woolworth’s Five and Dime store, the big four-story red brick one in downtown Detroit… “On the surface it seemed like the most ordinary of Saturdays at the most ordinary of American institutions,” Frank begins. A recent pamphlet by history professor Dana Frank at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) should resurrect this history and its lessons. The Detroit sit-down electrified the nation at the time, but has been relegated to a footnote in mainstream history, even among labor historians. What are its goals? How can they be achieved? Are workers getting organized for the long haul? Are we on a path to victory? In the wake of the Walmart and fast food strikes on Black Friday and December 5, it’s worth asking where the movement is going. So the story of a successful sit-down strike at a Woolworth’s in Detroit gives us some useful parallels for low-wage workers today. The lunch counters in these stores, serving inexpensive food, were in some ways a precursor to today’s fast food mega-corporations. The company had transformed the retail marketplace by creating a national chain of stores staffed by low-wage workers, mostly young women. In 1937, Woolworth’s was the Walmart of its day.
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