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The
Defining Moment:
The Kent Avenue Sitdown Strike
For most young, struggling
unions there comes a defining moment that truly tests
the mettle of the organization's leadership, and the
strength of the union's message. For TWU, that defining
moment came less than three years after the union was
founded in April 1934.
By 1936, TWU was openly representing workers employed by
the BMT subway line, and by Christmas it had membership
on every single transit line in New York City. TWU was
now far more than an annoyance to the powerful transit
bosses. It was a challenge the industry felt it had to
repulse. Never before had the transit interests of New
York City failed to crush a labor organization it could
not control. Now, it decided, TWU must go -- before it
grew any stronger -- before it became on other systems
the menace it was on the IRT subway line.
Beakie (hired spies) reports indicated that the place to
stamp it out was on the BMT, if possible, at the Kent
Avenue powerhouse in Brooklyn where only 35 out of 505
men had signed TWU cards. Smash it here, management
figured, and TWU's threat to the BMT was over. On
January 23, 1937, the BMT fired three engineers at the
Kent Avenue plant for union activity. They were three of
the 35 TWU members out of the 505 workers in the plant.
The company had answered TWU's challenge to its
supremacy. This was its move to wipe out the upstart
union once and for all. What would TWU do? What could it
do?
Nothing happened on the 23rd, the day the three men were
fired. Nor the following day. The next day was the 25th
and management was beginning to relax as the day
proceeded normally -- until 3 P.M. At that hour,
exactly, the plant's huge doors closed on a "sit-in" of
498 men -- all wearing TWU buttons. This was what the
union had decided in answer to the company's firings.
Ninety-nine percent of the powerhouse workers supported
TWU -- an incredible conversion of 463 men to the cause
of industrial unionism.
Word of the "sit-in" swept through the system. Workers
from all departments, from the shops and barns, from
transportation, from station, from other powerhouses --
union men and non-union men -- converged on the Kent
Avenue plant. They picketed; they organized food
brigades; they surrounded the building and prevented the
company police, strike-breakers and the strong-arm
squads from breaking through the barricaded doors.
Newspaper reporters and camera men who came to cover the
story stayed to help in the lifting of food to the
"sit-ins" through windows some fifteen feet above the
street.
With the plant secured, and its members prepared for a
long siege, TWU issued an ultimatum to the BMT:
reinstate the three fired engineers by 6 A.M. tomorrow
morning, the 26th, or the electric power will be shut
off, affecting 2,400,000 BMT riders.
A half-hour before the deadline -- at 5:30 A.M. on
January 26th -- the company bowed to TWU's ultimatum.
The three men were reinstated unconditionally. There
would also be a meeting between the union and management
on the question of union recognition.
From this day forward the transit industry of the most
transit dependent city in the United States was never
the same. This was the turning point. For TWU, it opened
the road to the building of a great industrial union:
workers had seen it happen -- had seen TWU's "one for
all and all for one" actually work. They signed
membership cards by the thousands. For the transit
bosses, it was the beginning of the end of their harsh
and unquestioned control over the lives of the transit
workers. The men whose backs they had bowed for decades
had straightened up to walk erect with dignity.
From Kent Avenue, TWU buttons went up on every section
of the transit system. TWU was on the march. In three
years it had grown strong enough to take its place with
other industrial unions which were revolutionizing the
American mass production industries. In 1935 the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had been
formed by eight AFL international unions in the belief
that industrial unionism as opposed to craft unionism
was necessary for the organization of workers in the
auto, steel, rubber and textile fields.
By 1937 the cry "CIO" was across the land. It had a
powerful appeal to a young and vigorous TWU desirous of
an affiliation more imaginative, more daring, and more
militant than was available to it as Lodge 1547 IAM-AFL.
Thus, in April 1937, following full discussion by all
Sections, TWU voted to leave the Machinists Union and
seek affiliation with the CIO.
TWU received its charter in the CIO on May 10, 1937.
Five days later, the newspapers screamed in front page
headlines that 92 percent of the IRT workers had voted
for TWU as their collective bargaining representative.
TWU had passed its test at Kent Ave. The union was here
to stay.
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