Subscribe That morning, the company’s 4,300 employees arrived at the plant at 9:30 a.m. as usual, and for the first hour, work ran as it usually did. “Then there was a stop at the freight shops at the northern end of town,” the paper reported. “About 150 men were at work here. They dropped their tools and the first notice that the townspeople had of the trouble was when the body of workmen marked out of the freight shops and started rapidly but quietly south to call out the men in the other departments.” Word spread quickly throughout the company buildings: “The men are out! They’ve struck!” One of the leaders told a Daily News reporter that they expected “to have every man out by 10 o’clock.”