On July 1, 1930, 200 metal trimmers and polishers at GM’s Fisher Body No.1 (Fisher One) in Flint, MI, laid down their tools and stormed off the job, hollering for others to follow. They were fed up with speedups and piecework payments that plant management imposed to reduce production costs. Some 2,000 other disgruntled workers joined in for two days of disruptive marches and demonstrations through downtown Flint and at Fisher One, where they blocked access to the plant. Parading and chanting with them were members of the Automotive Industrial Workers Association, a Detroit-based communist front that helped organize and lead the strike.
Sixty-five miles north of Detroit, Flint was the bastion of the GM empire—“a gritty monument to the transfiguring power of the industrial revolution,” declared historian David M. Kennedy. The first Buicks were built there in 1904, and the company now employed 47,000 workers in 13 plants in the city of 156,000 residents. Eighty percent of Flint families relied on GM for their livelihoods.