GM’s Fisher Body Ohio Company was located on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, in the Collinwood neighborhood of the city. 7,000 workers produced Chevrolet bodies at the facility. In December of 1936 the UAW was working hard using sit-down strikes to gain national recognition from General Motors. Fisher Body workers in Kansas City began a sit-down strike on Dec. 16, right on the heels of GM workers in Atlanta sitting down. Soon after, on Dec. 28, a relatively small group of workers at Fisher Body in Cleveland, about 200, sat down at their machines and joined their co-workers in Atlanta and Kansas City, protesting lower wages at Fisher Body plants than at GM facilities, and for discriminatory firings of workers. At 2 p.m. on Dec. 28 their sit-down began and 125 picketers joined them on the street shortly after as the news spread of the action. The Cleveland Fisher Body workers had a set list of demands that they made clear to management: They wanted to avoid layoffs by changing the shift schedule and creating three, seven-hour shifts. If they were going to have to work on a holiday or a Sunday they expected to be paid double their regular wage. They also demanded that union members who were negotiating with management on these terms be paid for their negotiating time. Contentious negotiations between workers and management in Cleveland lasted for more than a month. All the while, the 200 workers at the Collinwood Fisher Body plant stayed put and held strong with their sit-down strike. As time dragged on past the holidays, the nation paid more attention to the GM Fisher Body strikes in Atlanta, Kansas City and now Cleveland, even prompting President Roosevelt to publicly reprimand GM for refusing to grant workers their terms of settlement for the strike. The federal government would eventually get involved with all of the disputes between strikers and General Motors Corp. that started that December, with the president noting that GM “accounted for about one-twentieth of the economic activity of the United States.” That percentage was even more important in 1936 because it was helping lift the country out of the Depression. These GM jobs and the buying power it created for the workers were essential to the country’s economic recovery. The Cleveland strike finally ended when the company agreed to recognize the UAW after the famous Flint Sit-Down strike further caught the country’s attention, ending in February of 1937. Immediately after the Flint recognition, the city of Cleveland and its Fisher Body workers celebrated. The city’s leading newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, put it this way: "Word of the strike settlement was received with rejoicing by the whole Collinwood district, where many of the strikers live and where merchants had felt the financial effect of the stoppage of thousands of weekly pay envelopes." #UnionHistory #PROUAW ... See MoreSee Less