BY STEVE WARSHELL
PITTSBURGH - Socialist workers who are members of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) met here September 20 - 21 to discuss the shifting relationship between the employers and the working class and the openings to explain socialist ideas today. Pittsburgh was selected as the site of the meeting so the participants could also attend the events held around the AFL-CIO convention.

Discussion at the socialist meeting began with a main political report presented by Gaetan Whiston, a steelworker from St. Paul, Minnesota. Hightlighting the collapse of the Southeast Asian "tiger economies," he outlined the deepening worldwide economic depression and deflationary pressures leading to stagnating industrial productivity as key factors in understanding today's political developments.

"The world capitalist system is increasingly unstable," he said, "and we and our co-workers need to better understand the political economy that underlies both the attacks by the bosses and their government on our unions, as well as the resistance to it by union members."

A number of workers at the meeting said they and their co-workers are producing more steel than ever before, yet the corporations are on a drive to reduce the workforce by eliminating and combining jobs, cutting back safety needs, holding down wages, and further increasing production.

"There is a recent list of victories by workers in the United States," Whiston noted, "such as the victory at UPS, the 10-month-long Wheeling Pitt Steel strike, the transit workers strike in San Francisco, the six strikes against General Motors this year, and the continuing struggle against the Detroit News and Free Press." Whiston pointed to a recent headline in Business Week. The magazine referred to the UPS victory as a "wake-up call for business."

John Studer, who works in a steel mill near Chicago, noted the change in many of the UPS strikers. He described meeting a Teamster picket captain, a Vietnam veteran, who summed up his life experience saying, "In the '60s the government sent us to war to kill people who had nothing against us. Now the corporations are at war against us, and the government is their biggest ally."

"Many workers," Studer went on "have had to think this through. They've been told strikes don't work, that they have to make concessions. But what they've seen is that retreat only leads to more retreat."

The weekend included a special Militant Labor Forum by Betsey Stone, an airline worker and member of the International Association of Machinists. She discussed an international labor conference held in July in Havana, Cuba.

Virtually every participant in the socialist meeting had been actively involved in work supporting the strike by at Wheeling-Pitt Steel. The socialists discussed the strike as an important victory for the USWA and the working class as a whole and a blow to the bosses plans to drive down wages and pension benefits.

Sheila Ostrow, a steelworker from Pittsburgh, noted both the changes in the strikers as they fought the battle as well as the contributions made by socialist workers. "Strikers began to reach out to others, to look for fighters to link up with. They went to the NAACP convention here in Pittsburgh seeing it as a place to build support for their strike. And we built support for them in our locals by being part of plant gate collections, raffles, food drives, getting our co-workers to the picket lines, and where possible having strikers come to our local meetings to speak. This kind of solidarity makes us better revolutionary politicians in the union."

Brian Williams, who works at a steel mill near Baltimore, reported on gains made by socialists in the USWA to advance along three areas, "First, by acting as revolutionaries we seek to win workers to our socialist ideas through talking socialism, sales of Pathfinder books and the Militant newspaper and publicizing party campaigns. Second, socialist workers are activists seeking to build worker participation in a wide range of protests from fights against police brutality to the fight against the U.S. war drives. Third, we are union activists with a revolutionary perspective who, while operating within the union structure and realities of today, have a clear picture of the revolutionary transformation that needs to occur."

Williams pointed to several union gatherings that socialist workers had participated in during the past months, including regional union conferences, the USWA legislative conference, the Working Women's Conference, and the AFL-CIO convention just getting under way in Pittsburgh.

"Using Pathfinder books and the Militant newspaper is central to our political work in the unions." He continued, "We have seen increased interest in our ideas as the working class has scored some recent victories."

Conference participants took a goal of selling 40 Pathfinder books and pamphlets per month to fellow steelworkers and plan to sell 38 subscriptions to the Militant newspaper by October 26 as part of the international circulation drive and to track their progress along these lines.

Steve Warshell is a member of USWA Local 1104 in Lorain, Ohio.  
 
 
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