In a report on “Our class, the garment and textile industries, and the union,” Maggie Trowe, a sewing machine operator from Boston, pointed to the three-decade-long assault on workers in the United States. This has resulted in lower real wages; speeding up of production; stretching out of the working day, week, and year; and cuts in medical coverage and other benefits.

“Communists need to be versed in and knowledgeable about the industry and the union, and ready to discuss and debate burning questions for labor,” Trowe explained. “Like how to fight for jobs, how to defend the social wage, and how to organize unions along industrial lines that are capable of winning strikes and building confidence, solidarity, and combativity among workers.”

It will be by using union power, when workers organize and act together to demand better pay and conditions, that these assaults can be met, Trowe said. She noted that the seeds of labor’s transformation—of workers coming to the conclusion that they need to organize and fight together in a union—are germinating at the same time that the trade unions in the United States continue to weaken.

Bea O’Connor, a sewing machine operator at Point Blank Body Armor in south Florida, described how after winning union recognition and the first contract at that plant, workers faced the task of consolidating and strengthening the union. “When workers, including Latino unionists, joined a demonstration for Haitian rights,” O’Connor said, citing one example, “this helped cut across the attempt by the company to sow divisions among the Haitian and Latino workers. It strengthened the union.”

Lea Sherman, a garment worker from Washington, D.C., noted that workers under the recently negotiated menswear national contract are paying more for health care.

Several socialist unionists pointed to examples of the bosses putting the blame for these worsening conditions on “foreign competition,” particularly singling out China.

Communists should respond to the chauvinist campaign of the bosses that targets China, Trowe said. “Chinese workers being drawn into the industrial working class will be our allies,” Trowe said. “The working class must start with a world perspective if we are to fight effectively.”

Trowe said the officials of UNITE HERE, the union that resulted from the merger of the garment and textile workers union and the hotel workers union last summer, chime in on the employers’ chauvinist campaign to reinstate the cap on Chinese textile imports that was lifted in January. She pointed to the irony of a union-organized rally of Chinese-born garment workers in San Francisco to protest job losses to workers in China.

UNITE HERE officials have joined with those of some other unions, including the Service Employees International Union, to push for what they claim is a reform program for the unions, Trowe said. They have promoted a course of action that is no better than the one being promoted by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, who was touted as a “reform” candidate 10 years ago. They have pushed for mergers of unions, with the goal of consolidating into four or five big unions.

“The proposed mergers won’t strengthen the unions,” Trowe said. “Instead, they dilute their industrial character and avoid the challenge of organizing the unorganized and building the size and strength of the labor organizations.”

“We have to politicize our work in the unions,” said James Harris, a textile worker from Atlanta who presented a report on the next steps needed to strengthen the work of Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist members in the trade unions.

The meeting decided to work at increasing the number of situations where two or more communists are working together in the same plant. This will improve socialist workers’ ability to do political work in the unions and carry out party-building campaigns in a collective manner. “We should decide on the factories and mills to target based on where we have had the most effective sales of the communist press,” Harris said, “as well as opportunities to advance trade union work and recruit to the communist movement.”

Harris stressed the importance of studying the two new issues of the Marxist magazine New International, which feature the articles “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun” and “Our Politics Start with the World.” When done along with co-workers, this study will place union struggles in an international working-class perspective and not just in the framework of the factory you work in, he said.

The election campaigns of the Socialist Workers candidates for local offices across the nation will also provide important opportunities to raise with co-workers and others the need to organize and strengthen the unions.

“The drive toward unions is spontaneous,” said Harris, “but the development of a class-conscious revolutionary party is not. That is why we are in industry, going through the same experiences with other workers, and bringing with us the lessons and history of the world’s working class.”  
 
 
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