omobile Workers. It had attracted 13,000 members by 1916. The bitter rivalries within the American Federation of Labor doomed this effort to failure, however, and by 1920 the now-independent Auto Workers Union was no match for Ford or General Motors. There were then 340,000 auto workers, and they had no union protection at all (Mann, 1987: 30-31).
The Auto Workers Union had been led by the Socialist Party for a time and then by the Communist Party during the 1920s. Relations between the union and the auto industry saw the auto industry always on top until 1934 with the New Deal era passage of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA) that declared that employees had the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing. Many of the nation's half-million auto workers at first believed that the law would provide government support for union organizing drives, but in practice little protection was succeed. By 1935, collective bargaining had still failed to come to the auto industry. Alfred P. Sloan was then head of General Motors and claimed that his company was a model employer, so a union was not needed. He said that his workforce would have little enthusiasm for a union. However, by then an industrial union of auto workers was an idea whose time had come. The founding convention for the UAW was held in April 1936, and by December of that year the union was involved in the Flint sit-down strikes. In 1936, the UAW took on General Motors and finally won a contract in 1937 (Mann: 45-47).
At this time, the UAW was an organization with fewer than 150 members, but it managed to succeed in Flint and with General Motors. These victories gave the union considerable cachet among workers. The sit-down strike was the tactic used by the union in these battles (Yates, 1983: 244-245). Within months of its success with General Motors, the UAW had increased its membership to nearly 400,000 a...