Workers at the March 13-14 meeting took note of the continuing resistance by workers to the bosses’ attacks and the opportunities to build solidarity within the labor movement for striking coal miners in Utah.

“Union organizing drives in Nebraska and Iowa are continuing in several meat and poultry plants. Many of these workers are more open to our ideas because of the struggles they are engaged in,” said Lisa Rottach, who works at a packing plant in Omaha. The socialist meat packers discussed the work they are involved in to help build the April 25 march on Washington to defend a woman’s right to choose. They are looking for ways to work with others who want to build the march. Among their tools in this mass work are Pathfinder books and pamphlets that are sharply reduced in price until May 1.

In a report to the meeting, Dennis Richter from San Francisco described recent developments in the labor movement, including the solidarity that has been organized for the striking coal miners at CW Mining (Co-Op) in Huntington, Utah.

“Many unionists, rank-and-file workers as well as officials of our unions, are interested in getting involved in this. What we and others in the labor movement do can make a difference in this strike,” he said.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a series of speaking engagements were organized in January for four striking coal miners, at the initiative of the Labor Committee for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA). The miners spoke to more than eight unions and union bodies such as the San Francisco Central Labor Council.

“The tour had a big impact on workers they spoke to about their fight, as well as on the miners themselves, who are learning about the history of workers’ struggles in the United States,” Richter said. More than $10,000 was raised there to bolster the strike funds. The miners were particularly impacted by the reception they received at a meeting of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). A delegation of longshoremen later traveled to Huntington to participate in a strike solidarity rally there.

“We think this strike has the potential to win,” Richter said. “It was started by workers who came to the decision to organize. They drew the union into their fight and at the same time caught the bosses off guard.”

A number of those attending the socialist meeting said they are becoming more effective at doing strike solidarity work within the union structures as they exist today.

“If we are working with others in our plants and union who are inspired by these fights, if we are patient and approach it the right way, solidarity will be won from the union movement, maximizing the chances of victory,” Richter explained.

In a report entitled “Re-universalizing the turn and deepening communist penetration into our class,” Socialist Workers Party leader Joel Britton stated that the question of the proletarian party is as important today as it was at the founding convention of the SWP in 1938 when party founder James P. Cannon said, “All the experience of the class struggle on a world scale … teaches one lesson: the most important problem of the working class is the problem of the party.”

Britton quoted from reports contained in the book, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics; Working-class politics and the unions, by Jack Barnes to review the decisions made by the party in the mid to late 1970’s to once again concentrate political work in the industrial unions.

This turn to industry was a universal effort by the party, involving every branch and every individual member. It was a political move flowing from the big changes facing the capitalist class on a world scale and the need of the imperialist ruling classes around the world to advance their offensive, more and more making the industrial workers and their unions their target. Attitudes among the working class were changing in response to this offensive.

“Twenty years later, these changes are more evident today,” Britton told the meeting. “Worker-bolsheviks are in the unions for one reason: to build the party. This is the arena where we will either win the leadership of our class or see petty-bourgeois currents triumph and the revolution go down to defeat. This is why we must go deeper into the unions.”

As the bosses’ assaults have deepened in the past decade, workers in several industries have been resisting. Socialist workers, concentrated in the meatpacking plants, garment factories, textile mills, and coal mines, have sought to be part of these struggles.

Britton explained that it would take a renewed collective effort to ensure that every member who can be part of a union fraction does so and that he or she gets the needed help from local party leaderships to make it possible.

Ron Short, a Young Socialist from San Francisco, emphasized the importance for youth of a revolutionary proletarian party where, working with party members of all generations, they can learn proletarian habits, including collective, disciplined functioning.

As part of a kickoff target week to the spring subscription drive organized by the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, socialist meat packers projected a West Coast regional team to Fresno, California, and a Midwest regional team to Storm Lake, Iowa, on the weekend of March 27-28.

David Rosenfeld from Omaha said, “At the same time that we introduce the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, we will explain to our co-workers that an $85,000 fund has been launched to help finance these two socialist publications, which rely entirely on the contributions of working people. Many will see these as their publications and want to contribute.”
 

The socialist and textile workers discussed steps they are taking to root the party’s political activity deeper among workers and in the unions. They are doing this as they campaign against the imperialist offensive from Washington to Madrid, promote solidarity with union struggles such as the Utah coal miners strike, build the April 25 march on Washington for a woman’s right to choose abortion, and expand the circulation of the socialist press among workers and farmers.

In a report to the meeting, Socialist Workers Party leader Joel Britton began with the response by the communist movement to the stepped-up drive by Spanish imperialism against the peoples of the Basque country and North Africa using the March 11 train bombing as a pretext.

Referring to a statement by Martín Koppel for the SWP National Committee, Britton said, “Our statement is not a statement on the bombing; you can get that in Newsweek. We start with opposing Spanish imperialism, which has earned the well-deserved hatred of millions of the oppressed all over the world.”

Britton noted that this stance goes against the grain of the middle-class left, which sees it as progressive that the social democratic party in Spain won an electoral victory on the basis of calling for Spanish troops in Iraq to continue to be part of the imperialist occupation force in that country under the banner of the United Nations rather than formal U.S. administration. The “antiterrorist” campaign of the Spanish rulers serves to justify employer assaults on working people in that country, and the Spanish nationalist anti-Americanism promoted by the Socialist Party is prowar poison aimed at subordinating working-class interests to those of the capitalist rulers.

Britton took up the importance of joining with others to build a massive turnout for the April 25 march on Washington for a woman’s right to choose abortion. Socialist workers participate in building and attending the march not simply to meet others interested in a communist perspective, but because we support the struggle for women’s rights, and a large turnout will boost that fight, Britton said. Socialists can make an additional contribution by working with others to involve more workers and farmers to the march.

Britton spoke about the effort by the Socialist Workers Party as a whole to make sure all its members who are able to are working in garment and textile, meat packing, and coal—industries the party has focused on because of the sharpness of the bosses’ attacks and the potential for resistance by workers in those industries. To do this, “we have to revitalize our job search committees and organize systematically to make sure every member who can be is a part of this effort.”

Participants in the meeting reported that students on campuses everywhere are organizing buses, attending planning meetings, and leafleting to build the April 25 march. They noted the openings to involve workers and their unions in this activity.

Maggie Trowe gave a report that focused on the campaign to win support for the strike by the Co-Op miners in Utah to organize a union. She noted that there had been some progress in gathering official union support for the miners strike since the last meeting of socialist garment and textile workers in December.

“The stakes in this strike are big,” said Trowe. “In face of the continuing weakening of the unions, our class needs to win some strikes that can help revitalize the labor movement.”

The garment and textile workers voted to take a goal of selling 50 Militant and 40 Perspectiva Mundial subscriptions as part of the international sales drive—double the goal taken during the previous subscription campaign. They are also joining the campaign to sell Pathfinder books that are specially discounted as part of building the April 25 march on Washington.

A glimpse of the attraction of these books was seen at a Militant Labor Forum on the rightist takeover and U.S. invasion of Haiti that was held that weekend in Miami. Many of the youth attending the forum took advantage of the “supersaver” prices by scooping up several Pathfinder titles at a time.

The forum itself provoked a lively discussion from the more than 55 participants. A Haitian worker kicked off the discussion after the presentation asking, “What is the real purpose of U.S. troops in Haiti, since it is not to stop violence. Haitians continue to die every day.”

A worker from the Point Blank Body Armor plant, where garment workers went on a six-month strike last year in an ongoing effort to organize into UNITE, took part in the forum. She said she had been hearing a variety of opinions on the events unfolding in Haiti from her Haitian co-workers. “I was surprised at what I heard tonight. I didn’t know the depth of the problems in Haiti,” she said, adding that she wanted to understand the situation there better.

James Harris works in a sewing plant in Atlanta, Janine Dukes is a textile worker in Sylacauga, Alabama.  
 
 
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