White Shirt Day was started in 1948 by Sit-Down Striker Bert Christensen, as a way to remind the younger workers just what the veterans had gone through to win them health care, job security, paid vacations, and pensions. During the strike, GM cut off the heat in the plants. The police fired tear gas, then bullets at the strikers. For forty-four nights, the men slept on auto seats while their wives passed food through the windows in baskets hoisted on ropes. A memorial outside the offices of UAW Region 1-D includes statues of strikers sitting on auto seats, as they did during the occupation of the plants, and of a police officer hauling away a member of the Women’s Emergency Brigade for breaking windows at Fisher Body #2, so tear gas could escape.
White Shirt Day and “The Birth of a Union”
