The Akron rubber strike of 1936 was a strike by workers against rubber factory owners in Akron, Ohio. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rubber factory workers, including those who worked for the three major rubber factories in Akron, OH, faced poor working conditions, low wages, and close to no benefits. The year 1936 was not only within this period in which rubber factory workers struggled with poor conditions and low wages, but also coincided with the period of the Great Depression in the United States, as well as the passing of the National Labor Relations Act. The combination of all these conditions, as well as many other conditions, caused the founding of the United Rubber Workers in 1935, and the major picket strike of February and March 1936. Unions United Rubber Council In 1933, the same year the National Recovery Administration was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) created a United Rubber Council (URC) to be a nationwide union for the industry. But workers at many individual factories had already organized federal local unions, and so recruitment was slow. So the AFL printed 50,000 leaflets and distributed them to the many rubber factories in Akron, Ohio, inviting workers to a recruiting meeting. About 5,000 workers showed up to hear the AFL's Paul Smith, and eventually about 50,000 workers joined the URC. But during a rubber industry strike in 1934 and 1935, the URC's elected leadership reached terms with factory management that many striking workers felt far too unfavorable. The union's membership to plummeted below 5,000 members. United Rubber Workers In its wake, the United Rubber Workers (URW) union was founded as the new industry-wide union. The AFL's William Green threatened to pull AFL funding from rubber-industry unions unless the URW elected as president the AFL's Coleman Claherty, who had been directing AFL activity in Akron since 1933. The rubber workers rejected Claherty, a boilermaker by trade, and elected instead Sherman Dalrymple, president of the B.F. Goodrich factory's local union. So the AFL ceased funding the rubber-industry union, after making one donation of $1,000 cash and passing along some URC assets: office furniture, equipment, and about $1,800 in a URC bank account. The URW eventually affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and solidified itself as the prominent industry-wide union for rubber workers through the remainder of the Great Depression and until