It was the most important discussion the party's "IAM fraction" has had in many years, focusing on a new vanguard being forged by workers fighting back against the employers' speed-up, praised in the daily press as a "productivity drive." Central to the discussion was the example being set for other unionists by workers in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

The fraction meeting also voted to take on a campaign to sell the new Pathfinder pamphlet, The Working-Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism by Jack Barnes, the party's national secretary. Adopting a goal of selling 35 copies of the pamphlet by October 1, participants in the meeting hoped to encourage the party's other union fractions and branch units to also discuss and adopt goals. The pamphlet is available in English, Spanish, and French. 
 
Transforming fraction functioning
The meeting opened with a report by Betsey Stone, a United Airlines cleaner at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Stone emphasized the necessity for socialist workers in the IAM to restructure and transform the functioning of their local union fractions, so they can more effectively be part of developing labor struggles, and so their day-to-day activity converges with that of other vanguard workers in the mines and mining communities, meatpacking plants, and garment and textile factories.

Among the most far-reaching examples of the developing workers resistance, Stone said, is the seven-hour sit-down strike June 1 by packinghouse workers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, who 51 days later voted to be represented by the UFCW and are now fighting for a contract. This battle is setting an example for labor in the Twin Cities and for packinghouse workers resisting speedup throughout the Upper Midwest.

Stone pointed to two recently concluded strikes of Western coal miners at Pittsburg and Midway (P&M) mines in New Mexico and Wyoming. These unionists successfully fought off a company attempt to impose a 12-hour day. In addition, the New Mexico miners beat back company efforts to force them to get medical treatment for themselves and their families at clinics on the impoverished Navajo reservation.

Stone also cited the current strike by 86,000 phone workers on the East Coast against Verizon, as well as a demonstration in New York City this spring at which workers from various unions joined together for a common rally, each carrying a giant inflatable rat representing the companies they are fighting.

During the discussion, participants noted other struggles by workers in their areas. Scott Breen, who works at a Boeing aerospace plant in Seattle, pointed to fights by meat packers, farm workers, and immigrant carpenters in central and eastern Washington. John Studer, a worker at USAir in Philadelphia, described the ongoing unionization effort in that area by mushroom workers.

"The fights at Dakota Premium, in Western coal, and elsewhere are being fueled by the employers' unrelenting attacks on workers and our unions," Stone said.

"The United Mine Workers at P&M are both celebrating their victory and positioning themselves to help strengthen other fights coming up in Western coal," she said. Stone noted that contracts expire August 31 at the Kayenta and Black Mesa mines in Arizona, both owned by Peabody Coal.

To advance their battle for a contract, workers at Dakota Premium Foods will need to join with workers at the company's sister plant in Long Prairie, Minnesota, and with other packinghouse workers around the country. "This includes forging ties with workers beginning to turn toward UFCW organizing efforts in nonunion plants in the Omaha, Nebraska, area," Stone emphasized.  
 
Being part of the fights
Joel Williams, a Chicago packinghouse worker and member of the SWP National Committee, attended the meeting on behalf of the party's trade union leadership.

The changing situation in the unions, Williams said, is increasing the likelihood that socialist workers will be involved in resistance in plants where they work. Building labor solidarity--unions supporting each other, sending money, speakers, walking each others' picket lines--is part of doing so.

"But we will be taken off course," Williams said, "if we approach solidarity activity as a strategy. It is not an alternative to the strategic course of communist workers, which is to get jobs where fights are under way or where the assaults by the employers are creating conditions we know will lead to fights, sooner rather than later."

There is no lack of centrist, middle-class organizations that operate in and around the unions with a "labor solidarity" strategy, he said.

"We should be getting into skirmishes as they develop where we are, and looking for jobs where they've begun or are likely to develop," said Williams. "These skirmishes will lead us to the next steps in strengthening and transforming our unions, including reaching out for mutual solidarity to other fighters and to their struggles."

That is happening already at Dakota Premium Foods, Williams noted. He also pointed to the example of the P&M strikers who took their struggle to workers in the oil industry in California, Utah, and Colorado. That was a natural extension of their fight to win a contract from P&M, which is a subsidiary of the energy giant Chevron.

Williams emphasized that it's hard to break out of old habits on the job. If you have been somewhere a long time, and you haven't been involved in the developing resistance in your plant, then it's harder to start doing it now. "It's better to get a fresh start, to get into a new fraction somewhere else," he said.

John Studer also addressed this point. The struggle at Dakota Premium is not unique, he said. "Similar struggles can and will break out elsewhere. If this were not true, the fighters in St. Paul would be in trouble. This can happen where we are working."

In her opening report, Stone contrasted the situation today with the experience of socialist workers in the 686-day Eastern Airlines strike that ended in early 1991. "That strike was a giant effort where we worked with others to reach out for solidarity," she said. "Workers at other airlines regularly marched on the Eastern workers' picket lines, and Eastern workers in turn came to our rallies and picket lines.

"Eastern strikers had a goal--to prevent Frank Lorenzo, Eastern's notorious union-busting CEO, from creating a nonunion empire at airports around the country." It was a fight to last "one day longer" than Lorenzo--"and they did," said Stone. "That put all airline workers on a stronger footing to resist employer attacks."

"Since the early l990s," Stone pointed out, "more years of attacks have gone by--attacks that have brutalized some layers of the working class more than others. The capitalists are fueling their economic boom on the backs of workers, who are being forced to work faster resulting in more injuries. We are working longer hours with fewer days off and less vacation time," she said, "and all the while our wages stagnate."

Having defeated Lorenzo's antiunion drive in 1991, the Eastern workers themselves had to take other jobs. That strike ended up marking the end of an upswing in labor fights that had begun in the latter 1980s. It was not the product of a sea change in working-class politics, such as we're now in the midst of.

Today, Stone said, more and more workers are open to finding an explanation of what is propelling the employers' speed-up offensive. This is generating interest in reading publications, such as the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books and pamphlets, which clearly explain the roots of these attacks in the intensifying competition for profits at the heart of the dog-eat-dog capitalist system.  
 
Resistance in the airlines
As the meeting convened, newspaper headlines were filled with news of the cancellations of United Airlines flights due to the refusal of the company's pilots to work overtime and the refusal of its mechanics to violate safety rules. Amid a hue and cry from the airlines, United pilots are explaining that the source of the problem is the company's refusal to hire an adequate number of pilots to staff its flight schedule. Meeting participants noted that many United baggage handlers and aircraft cleaners are growing impatient with working under the expired IAM contract.

Among other important examples of resistance by airport workers noted at the meeting were the work stoppage of DineAir workers at the Oakland airport; the organizing drives at the San Francisco airport by workers at Ogden Aviation and by food service workers; and the successful union organizing drive by baggage screeners and terminal cleaners employed by Argenbright at the Los Angeles airport.

Participants in the meeting discussed the fact that socialists in the IAM have not thrown themselves into all these struggles in the same way. Some of the most significant actions--such as at DineAir in Oakland, where nonunion workers carried out a work stoppage--were never drawn to the attention of the Militant newspaper's editor, so regular coverage could be carried.

Participants in the meeting concluded that the retreat of the labor movement in the l990s, under the blows of the employers' offensive, had had a deep impact on vanguard workers in the IAM, including those who are socialists. As time passed, they responded in less and less timely ways as the situation changed, as a new layer of workers--less affected by past union setbacks--began to resist the employers and reach out for allies. A new vanguard, largely drawn from fresh forces, is being forged and beginning to puts its stamp on struggles. Other workers looking for a road forward seek to emulate these fights.

Most participants in the meeting were the only members of the Socialist Workers Party in their workplaces, both in the airlines and in aerospace.

They noted that working alone reinforces conservatizing--and, worse, depoliticizing --habits in their work that came out of the retreat of the early 1990s. Only by changing this situation, they decided, could the party's union fractions in the airlines or aerospace begin to converge with the militant spirit of the fractions socialist workers are building today in the UMWA, UFCW, and UNITE.

Those present at the meeting voted unanimously to reaffirm the course charted by the party in the late 1970s, and reaffirmed several times since, that fractions of socialist workers be made up of at least two individuals working together with the same co-workers in the same workplace.

Participants voted overwhelmingly to set a deadline to end all one-person fraction situations. This includes situations where two socialists work for the same employer, are members of the same large union local (or a different union), but work in different areas without common co-workers. The work to carry out these decisions is the responsibility of the leaderships of party units in towns and cities where socialists are working IAM jobs. Party branches will decide which unions their members will work in, as part of effectively participating in the resistance of other working people in their area.

This effort, several participants remarked, includes reinforcing the steps under way in their branches to build fractions in the UMWA, among UFCW packinghouse workers, and in UNITE. A number of longtime airline workers in the party have already taken steps to change jobs and help build these fractions.  
 
Lessons of previous experiences
Other meeting participants pointed to the situation a couple of years ago when the mechanics at Northwest Airlines voted to join the Airline Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), an organization that sought to break mechanics away from other workers in the IAM. Socialist workers actively opposed this course prior to the vote. Afterwards they did not leave AMFA but instead became part of the effort to bring together in action workers at Northwest--both those in the IAM and those in AMFA--to fight company attempts to impose concession contracts.

In the absence of a substantial organized struggle at Northwest, however, meeting participants decided that holding AMFA jobs--which are primarily mechanics positions--is no longer fraction policy.

It's useful to take a fresh look at the experience of building the Teamsters union in Minneapolis and the Upper Midwest in the l930s, commented John Studer of Philadelphia in the discussion. This history is found in the four-volume series by Farrell Dobbs available from Pathfinder Press.

"The struggle went from the coal yards, to trucking more broadly in Minneapolis, to the over-the-road drivers throughout the region. Key to advancing that struggle was reaching out for solidarity to the wives and families of the strikers, to working farmers, to the unemployed, and to other workers in all kinds of situations inspired to form unions and use them.

"The pages of the union's paper, the Northwest Organizer, addressed the mounting imperialist war threats that culminated in World War II and other pressing social and political issues of the time. It was out of these experiences that a fighting union was forged and that recruitment to the revolutionary party developed," Studer said.

In addition to the effort to sell copies of The Working-Class and the Transformation of Learning, participants in the meeting voted to wage a campaign, ending October 1, to sell to co-workers 12 subscriptions to the Militant newspaper and 4 subscriptions to the Spanish-language monthly Perspectiva Mundial.