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A sitdown strike is a form of civil disobedience in which an organized group of workers, usually employed at a factory or other centralized location, take possession of the workplace by "sitting down" at their stations, effectively preventing their employers from replacing them with scab labor or, in some cases, moving production to other locations.
Workers had used this technique since the turn of the century, not only in the United States, but also in Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, and France. The United Auto Workers used this tactic with great success, most famously in the Flint Sit-Down Strike (1936-1937), in which strikers not only held a number of General Motors plants for more than forty days, but repelled the efforts of the police and National Guard to retake them. A wave of sitdown strikes followed, but ended by the end of the decade as the courts and the National Labor Relations Board held that sitdown strikers could be fired. While some sitdown strikes still occur in the United States, they tend to be spontaneous and short-lived.
French workers engaged in a number of factory occupations in the wake of the French student revolt in May, 1968. At one point more than twenty-five percent of French workers were on strike.
Activists in the American Civil Rights Movement used a similar tactic of "sitting in" at segregated facilities, first in the north in the 1940s and later in the south in the 1960s, to protest against segregation and dramatize the denial of their right to use these facilities. Other groups, such as college students engaged in protest movements in the 1960s, have used sit-ins since then, occupying the offices of the organization they oppose as a means of disrupting its operations or publicizing their demands.
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