Strike, 1980
Painting by Sue Coe, inspired by the following quote from a sit-down striker about the 1936 strike in Akron, Ohio: "Those machines had kept going as long as we could remember... I finally remembered something... that I was a human being, that I could stop those machines, that I was better than those machines anytime."
A poster of this work appeared in Images of Labor, an exhibit sponsored by District 1199's Bread and Roses Cultural Project and Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition service [sites] 1981-1983. The original was created for the 1199 Hospital and Health Care Workers Union. The work features a 1930s striker surrounded by machines and laborers while bosses at upper left (wearing suits with dollar signs) demand more work (presumably blood, sweat, and tears). The work references the beginning of the sit-down strike. Rubber workers in Akron, Ohio and autoworkers in Flint, Michigan pioneered the sit-down strike in response to speed-ups, unsafe working conditions, low pay, and lack of job security. The pioneering tactic became widely used (see the photo of the 1937 Woolworths sit-down strike) until the Supreme Court ruled it to be illegal in 1939.
Literature
Reproduced alongside review of the exhibition Images of Labor, Daily World, 1981Join our mailing list
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