The Flint Sit-Down Strike
This game simulates the Flint Sit-Down strike of 1937. Autoworkers occupied several facilities critical to General Motor's operations, crippling the company and forcing GM's management to recognize the United Auto Workers as the sole representative of GM's workers. This was a major victory for the American labor movement. You play as a UAW labor organizer, and you must secretly organize the takeover of GM's factories. This will be difficult because management has spies all over Flint, and GM controls Flint's local government. The Flint Sit-Down Strike has a lot in common with a military campaign. The occupation of GM’s factories required a high degree of operational secrecy. There was a battle when Flint police officers tried to enter one of the factories. However, this was essentially a struggle that resembles an insurgency. Like most companies in the first half of the twentieth century, General Motors used aggressive anti-union tactics to keep workers from organizing. GM ran its factories and the town of Flint like a police state, complete with a KGB like organization that collected intelligence on union activity. The Flint police department was basically a private police force for General Motor’s management. In past strikes, management could also call upon the Governor to send in the National Guard to break up strikes. Since many labor activists were Communists, Washington was lukewarm on labor unions at the best of times, giving management a free hand to operate as it pleased. GM was effectively a state with an army, a police force and an intelligence service at its disposal. As a union organizer, you will need to use stealth and political savvy to overcome all of this. Good luck.
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I keep coming back to this game.. It's due for a sequel.. The UAW Stand Up strike!
Loved this one! Living in Detroit, feeling grateful to see this focus on labor history in games. I love how as I play I can tell a story about what is happening - at first I don't have enough worker support to fend off the racist workers who ruin my support with Black voters, but it's very satisfying later on when I've got the worker support to shut down those actions! Feedback: Some actions are unclear, like I would like to know that I'm converting my management spies into organized crime before I press the button to do that! And it seems like the only affect of this change is that management can no longer bully their spies? This sounds like something which would have some drawback.. The balance is a bit off, I used food very rarely and always had a big surplus so was constantly throwing away the opportunity to do blankets and food drives.. I'll also say it feels a bit weird to get cards that are no longer useful, like secret meetings, when I've already got all the workers on my side and there's no way to lose their support.. Also, when the enemy does actions that have no effect, sometimes that is cool, if I've taken some action to make their actions ineffective, but other times it just feels like they're just inept.. trying to take my movement away when I have none for example.. It would also be great to clarify terms like afl, cio, craft unionism etc.. I'm glad I can figure out what they learn from a gameplay standpoint, but it wouldn't be bad to have a few words of flavor text to describe what the implications are of those things.. Anyways, really enjoyed this one, the gameplay really conveyed the theme, and would love to play more games around organizing like this!
Thanks for playing! This one is one of my favorites as well. If only I had the space for flavor text! I'd love to get into the history of the CIO and the Trotskyites who secretly organized the strike.
I am trying to make the video game equivalent of a 90 min. period drama movie. you can't cram much exposition into an hour an a half, and also tell a compelling story. I think the same is basically true of video games. If a director does his or her job right, the movie will make you want to look up the characters on Wikipedia. If some plays my game and then decides to lean more about A. Philip Randolph, I will be very happy :)
Fair enough - your tactic worked, I did indeed look up some of these terms!
Hey I'm curious - do you have a process for researching historical events for these games? Like do you read a book on the topic? Or watch documentaries? Or just via internet? How do you decide what goes in the game and what gets cut? What gets represented in the game play and what doesn't? Would love to hear the process for getting this level of understanding of the relationships between orgs and interest groups and the curation process!
Mostly books, movies, or podcasts. A good period drama generally lays out the basic structure of a conflict: who are the actors, what are the resources that they have at their disposal, etc. Podcasts are good for this as well, especially if we are talking about current events. Then its LOTs of internet research to fill in the details. With a good understanding of economics, figuring out how the various actors and resources fit together generally falls into place. As a rule of thumb, history happens because of changes in economics, technology and/or demographics. However, these changes tend to lead to interesting conflicts and clashes, like the one simulated here. Put another way, the industrial union movement was probably going to do some combination of things that you can do in this game to bring major corporations to the bargaining table. They had been trying to do this for decades, and the high tariffs, political environment, and low immigration rates of the 1930s finally allowed unions to win. Building a game like this is about figuring out how to represent those forces through the actions and decisions that actors on both sides could make.