On this day. 26 May 1936 around 6000 workers at six Remington Rand typewriter factories walked out on strike.
Workers at plants in New York state, Middletown, Connecticut and Ohio walked out on strike against a plan to relocate production from Syracuse, NY, to Ilion, NY. They also demanded a 20% pay increase and the rehiring of 17 workers who had recently been fired.
The employer implemented aggressive tactics to fight against the workers, which became the lasting legacy of the strike. Remington Rand president, James H Rand Jr, devised the strategy of breaking the strike and the workers’ organisation which became known as the “Mohawk Valley formula”, named after the region in which the Ilion plant was based.
The plan included: labelling union activists as “agitators”; organising business owners into a “Citizen’s Committee” to try to break the strike; using violent vigilantes to attack the workers, and using that violence to advocate a police crackdown on the strikers; propagating anti-union propaganda; issuing threats to close plants; and calling for the “right to work” and police protection for strikebreaking replacement workers.
Remington Rand fired all of the strikers, and instead hired replacement scab workers, and used security guards armed with bricks and clubs to escort the scabs into plants. They also harassed strikers by sending fake religious missionaries to strikers’ homes, and set up a fake company union.
Despite all of this the workers held out, and in 1937 the National Labor Relations Board issued a damaging report detailing all the ways Remington Rand had broken federal labour laws, and ordered strikers to be rehired.
The strike lasted until April 1937, but was not fully settled until 1940, when the company rehired all of the fired workers, disbanded their company union and recognised the American Federation of Labor-affiliated union.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7919/remington-rand-strike
Pictured: pickets and police during the strike https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=633075795532306&set=a.602588028581083&type=3
Etruscan bronze sculpture of the Chimera (known as the “Chimera of Arezzo”). Artist unknown; ca. 400 BCE. Found at Arezzo, Italy; now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence. Photo credit: Sailko/Wikimedia Commons.
