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By the end of the year Collins reported to me that he believed they had as many as four thousand members scattered through different plants and different companies. He was claiming four thousand members whom he believed to be bona fide members, and not just the riffraff that was attracted to the idea. They could be relied upon.

They began to have spontaneous strikes - brief, but very well organized, erratic, and taking place at different automobile factories at different times. These could usually be resolved into a protest for grievances, and as such a grievance could be written up and it would come before the grievance board. The rulings of the grievance board were, on the whole, acceptable, although there was lots of grumbling about them, either by employers, or by the workers. But, on the whole, they served to prevent these brief and sort of intermittent organising strikes from getting out of hand, and getting to be, what Collins used to say, “too big for the organization.” That is, a big spontaneous strike, when you haven't any organization to handle it, is, of course, a terrible headache to a trade union man, because there is nothing that they can get hold of and there is no coagulating force in the mass of people out of work. There's no way whereby those who have a bona fide desire to mako an organization can get it under