June 17 - IWW Strikes Studebaker

On this day in labor history, the year was 1913.

That was the day the Industrial Workers of the World led a strike at Studebaker in Detroit.

IWW organizers Matilda Rabinowitz, Jack Walsh and others arrived in Detroit to organize.

They gave lunchtime speeches outside the auto plants. 

Their speeches were so popular with Ford workers that managers at the Highland Park plant stopped allowing workers to take their lunches outside and had organizers arrested. 

They moved on to try to organize Studebaker, where they had supporters inside. 

Workers there had complaints similar to those at Ford, namely long hours and endless speed-up. 

At Studebaker, workers were also angry when management changed the way they were paid--from weekly to every other week. 

IWW supporter Dale Schlosser was fired from Studebaker’s #3 plant as he tried to circulate a petition for a return to weekly paydays. 

Word spread like wildfire and 3500 workers walked off the job in the first auto strike in Detroit. Rabinowitz and Walsh led a seven-mile march of thousands to Studebaker #1 and then downtown to Studebaker #5, calling workers out on strike. 

By the end of the day nearly 6,000 workers speaking a number of different languages voted for IWW representation and put together a list of grievances. 

IWW organizers envisioned an industry wide strike and 2000 strikers marched to the Packard plant the next day to call those workers out to join the strike.  

There they were met and beaten by police.

The strike and organizing drive was quickly crushed. Rabinowitz remarked that workers returning to Studebaker were even more determined to fight. 

IWW organizer Frank Bohn observed, “the strike was not for a few days or weeks, but maybe twenty or thirty years.”