"John, the people we sent to the Jung factory were beaten and 3 people were seriously injured. "On the phone, Fred told John the bad news that couldn't have been worse.www.biquge.info

"Who did that?"

"The workers in the factory, who said it was instigated by the CIO (Federation of Industrial Trade Unions)." Fred's answer made John smell a strong sense of conspiracy.

According to John and Edsel's previous agreement, Fred sent a team of seven people to the Jung factory half a month ago to investigate Ford's production and operation to obtain first-hand data needed to design the entire supply chain logistics solution. These people are all university graduates with a background in mathematics, statistics, and co-ordination, and are not professionals in the automotive industry. In order to facilitate their work, they are "a group that reports directly to the president and specializes in special projects", without any actual title or fixed job responsibilities.

A week earlier, Fred had complained to John that the workers in the Jung factory treated them like lepers, and that few dared to approach them, making it difficult for them to gather information. At that time, John's main focus was still on choosing a location for the new company, and he didn't pay much attention to it, but just told Fred to calm everyone's emotions. I didn't expect something to happen.

John speculated that the factory workers were mistaking the members of the research team for spies on covert efforts to investigate union members. In this era, the contradictions between labor and management in factories are very acute. It is a common practice in many companies to spy on union members and find excuses to dismiss them in order to undermine the union movement. Front-line workers don't know if they stumble upon a union in a conversation with a colleague and will fire them for inefficiency. But the reaction of the Jung factory workers was so fierce this time that John decided that someone must be behind the instigation, and that this person was Bennett nine times out of ten. Although Bennett may not be aware of John and Edsel's plan, the people in the research team arranged for him to enter through Edsel, and he must have smelled something unusual and wanted to test it through this means.

Thinking that he had grasped the crux of the matter, John arranged for Fred to deal with the aftermath while he began to think about how to find an opportunity to teach Bennet a lesson. However, what happened in the next few months simply stunned him, not only ruined all his plans, but also dealt a serious blow to his sense of superiority and self-confidence as a "time-traveler".

I have to admit that John has worked hard enough after "crossing" into this world. He can be said to be making the most of the "future" information resources at his disposal. But he still has a huge flaw in his birth -- although he lived in the United States for six years in his previous life, he is not an American after all, and he does not know much about American history. His perception of current American society comes from John's own memories.

So, although John was aware of the economic crisis that occurred in 1929-1933, he also knew about Roosevelt's New Deal. But he had never heard of a small economic crisis in the United States from 1937 to 1938 (the reason for this was that the world war that broke out later successfully saved the American economy. Not to mention the wave of the workers' movement that erupted across the United States in 1937.

The outbreak of the American labor movement in 1937 was caused by the famous Wagner Industrial Relations Act, passed by Congress at the end of 1936. The Industrial Relations Act clearly stipulates that workers have the right to organize themselves for collective bargaining. At the time, all the employers didn't take it too seriously. Think of this as nothing more than a ploy by the Democrats, who control Congress, to help Roosevelt win votes in the second presidential race. They all confidently waited for the Supreme Court to overturn the new law. However, the grassroots workers rejoiced, and soon the Confederation of Industrial Trade Unions (CIW), an American labor organization with explosive combat effectiveness, became independent from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and began to "make waves" throughout the United States.

John knew very little about trade union organization in his previous life. After all, when he was in China, his perception of the union was to organize two movies a year, and distribute some grain, oil, and fruits during the holidays. When he arrived in the United States, foreign employees like him, who were obviously here to grab jobs, were born not to be treated by trade union organizations. As a result, he never seriously considered the possible impact of the labor issue when formulating his plan. Even when he was busy preparing for the company, he didn't pay attention to the "Flint sit-down strike" that was taking place at the General Engineering Division next door. If John had known that the GM strike had been triggered by the factory firing two members of the Auto Workers' Union, he would certainly not have behaved as easily as he does now. In fact, he was already in the midst of the largest auto workers' strike in U.S. history, but he didn't know it.

Soon, John discovered that the situation had taken him by surprise. Not only in Flint, but also in Cleveland to Detroit, and even throughout Michigan, there have been strikes at hundreds of auto factories. Whether it's GM, Chrysler or Ford, auto workers shut down production lines, kicked foremen out of factories, and began demanding higher benefits and the right to establish labor organizations in the form of sit-ins on the factory floors. More than 200,000 workers participated in the strike, which quickly spread from the three major automakers to the entire industry, with production plummeting from 53,000 to 1,500 a week.

By April, John had to gather all his subordinates in the newly rented office building in Detroit, thank them for their hard work in recent months, and announce that the company had decided to temporarily close for safety reasons, and that all employees would be entitled to paid leave. Less than a month after the company was founded, and John had never dreamed that he would encounter such a situation without even holding a decent opening ceremony. He even suspected that God had put him in this age to see his jokes.

But what can he do? Now, not just Detroit, but the whole of Michigan is in chaos and panic. Michigan Governor Murphy has ordered the National Guard to be dispatched, hundreds of thousands of people are engaged in tense standoffs, and skirmishes are happening daily. The tense situation almost made John think that he had taken the wrong script, could it be that a proletarian revolution was about to break out in the United States? Under these circumstances, it was clear that John's Ford logistics transformation plan would not be able to continue, and Edsel had called to make it clear that he would put the plan on hold for the time being, and even the trucks that John had ordered from Ford would not have to be delayed.

For the Roosevelt administration, the sit-down strike put them in a dilemma. Legally, the occupation of factories by workers is an encroachment on private property, and the government must protect private property. In particular, these car companies are listed companies, and strictly speaking, they belong to all hundreds of thousands of shareholders and not to the company's management. So the government, both legally and morally, can justify the crackdown. However, no one dared to do so. Especially at a time when left-wing communism and right-wing fascism were spreading on the European continent, the government did not dare to take drastic action.

In the end, the U.S. government chose to sacrifice the dignity of the law. After a week of intense negotiations, the workers received a 25 percent pay rise and the Auto Workers Union was granted the sole collective bargaining agency. The workers' movement, which lasted 44 days and paralyzed nearly 100 factories in 14 states, finally ended with the victory of the CIO (Federation of Industrial Trade Unions). When John, who was resting at his home in Cincinnati, learned of the results of the strike, a phrase from a previous high school textbook came to mind—the weakness of the bourgeoisie.

Clearly, John was not alone in recognizing this weakness. After its success in the automotive industry, the CIO-led labor movement began to blossom across the country in every industry, and throughout the spring and summer of 1937, news of workers' sit-down strikes was everywhere. The wave of strikes continued until May before subsiding as the attention of the whole United States was drawn away by another "big event" across the Atlantic.

On May 12, George VI (Queen Elizabeth's father) was crowned the new King of England at Westminster Abbey. Immediately afterwards, his elder brother, King Edward VIII of England, officially married Mrs. Simpson. All Americans lie on their stomachs in the newspapers, greedily reading all the reports about this romantic love story of the British royal family. Even Adele set her alarm clock for 5 a.m. and listened to the entire live broadcast of the coronation on the radio. Obviously, he was a passionate class fighter one second, but how could he become a hot-blooded gossip party in the next second? This change in style made John feel a little "ridiculous", and he had to admit that he really didn't understand Americans.