General Motors

General Motors is presented in the book through the scale and consequences of its postwar labor dispute. The strike involved 175,000 employees in plants across 19 states and lasted more than three months, placing the company at the center of a national crisis over labor and industrial production.

The Strike in a National Labor Crisis

The walkout unfolded as labor tensions worsened and President Harry S. Truman struggled to find a response that could satisfy neither labor nor management nor Congress. He called for reasonable pay increases through collective bargaining, then, under pressure from both parties to take a harder line, asked Congress to prohibit strikes in major national industries for thirty days while a fact-finding board assessed the situation. The General Motors employees’ strike became one of the most consequential conflicts of this unsettled period.

Effects Across Industry

The stoppage persisted into a wider disruption triggered when John L. Lewis called miners out of the mines. Without coal, steel plants banked their furnaces, and Ford and Chrysler were forced to close. Freight loadings fell by 75 percent, while Chicago ordered electricity use cut in half. The account places General Motors’ prolonged strike within this cascade of interruptions: a labor dispute at a major employer unfolding alongside shortages that constrained production and transport across the country.

Place in the Account

General Motors is not discussed through its internal structure or corporate leadership here; its significance lies in the size and duration of the walkout and its place in the postwar labor crisis. The strike illustrates how a dispute involving workers at plants in 19 states became part of a broader industrial emergency, compounding pressure on an administration already struggling to mediate between labor, management, and the public consequences of interrupted production.