06/20/2026
On this day, June 20, 1941, the UAW and Ford Motor Company signed their first collective bargaining agreement.
Henry Ford, company founder and president, despised labor unions and was hell-bent on doing whatever was necessary to keep workers unorganized. He hired Harry Bennett to run Ford’s Service Department, the company’s internal police force and union-busting department.
Bennett, a former boxer with ties to the mob, was a ruthless enforcer of Henry Ford’s wishes. He would fire any worker he suspected was sympathetic to the union cause and wouldn’t hesitate to have workers assaulted if that meant keeping workers from organizing. Bennett was so detested for his actions that one newspaper outlet referred to him as “America's Most Reviled Corporate Thug.”
Bennett hired ex-athletes, former criminals, and tough characters into the Service Department to patrol the Rouge to keep workers from organizing.
Winning their union was a long and bitter struggle for workers at the manufacturing giant. As writer Ken Coleman wrote in a 2021 article: “The UAW-Ford conflict was years in the making.”
On March 7, 1932, thousands marched from Detroit to the Rouge Plant, protesting massive layoffs and working conditions at Ford during the Great Depression. The march became known as the Ford Hunger March. When marchers arrived in Dearborn, city police and Ford Service Department henchmen shot and killed four workers and wounded many more.
Five years later, on May 26, 1937, Ford security guards at the Rouge plant violently assaulted UAW organizers attempting to distribute pro-union leaflets in what became known as the Battle of the Overpass.
On April 1, 1941, Bennett fired eight pro-union workers at the Ford Dearborn Rouge plant. In response, workers at the plant staged a strike. Although the strike would ultimately be broken, it applied even more pressure on Henry Ford to recognize workers’ desire to unionize.
However, the greatest factor in Henry Ford's reluctant change of heart to negotiate with the UAW may have been his wife, Clara. She feared that her husband’s refusal to work with the unions would result in more riots and bloodshed and threatened to leave him if he did not sign the contract.
Faced with the proposition of his wife leaving him, Ford finally agreed to bargain with the union. The company and the UAW would sign the first-ever collective bargaining agreement on this day, 85 years ago.
📸 Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor & Urban Affairs
