Also taking place alongside the UNITE meeting was a meeting of socialists who are part of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). It brought together miners from the coalfields in Appalachia, Alabama, southern Illinois/Kentucky, and in the West, as well as anthracite miners from central Pennsylvania.

The strikes by UMWA members at the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Co. (P&M) mines in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and near Window Rock, Arizona; the victorious organizing drive at Dakota Premium Foods in St. Paul, Minnesota; and the strikes by UNITE-organized laundry workers in Pompano Beach, Florida, and in Chicago set the framework for the discussions by socialists at both meetings.  
 
Support for laundry workers
Many rich experiences in spreading solidarity were discussed at the meeting of the UNITE fraction. Lisa Potash, a sewing machine operator in Chicago, described how she and other co-workers joined the picket lines of laundry workers on strike there.

"The laundry workers were striking to organize UNITE at Five Star Laundry," said Potash. "Several workers from the large Hart Schaffner and Marx garment plant where I work put aside other responsibilities and were inspired to join in picketing and leafleting teams. One young Mexican co-worker at the plant has been watching politics more closely these days and decided to take another step by going to the picket line," she continued.

In the opening report at the UNITE national fraction meeting entitled "Merging with the working-class resistance," Alyson Kennedy, a sewing machine operator and a member of UNITE in St. Louis, described the expanded openings for fighting workers to join others in struggle, and to organize solidarity. Through this, there will be more opportunities to introduce the socialist periodicals the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial and Pathfinder books, she explained.

"There are high stakes in these fights," Kennedy told those at the weekend conference, "and what revolutionary workers do in the plants, mills, and mines today matters and will have an impact on the outcome of a fight, strike, or union-organizing drive." She added that central to the weekend meeting was taking steps to get units of socialist workers "into fighting trim, into the kind of combat units that they need to be in order to get more deeply involved in these fights."

Patient, daily work by socialist workers on the job alongside their co-workers leads to trust and confidence by other fighting workers. Workers are determining through experience and common action who they trust and who they will fight together with against the bosses and their government.

The meeting showed the progress that has been made in getting fractions of two working together in the same garment plant or textile mill. Having strong functioning local fractions in Chicago and Miami, for example, strengthened the ability to do solidarity work with the laundry workers strikes.  
 
Learning from ultraleft errors
Kennedy pointed out that socialists in UNITE have had to learn from a number of ultraleft errors in their work over the past few months. In one case, a local fraction of socialists in a UNITE shop in Pittsburgh got ahead of where their co-workers were willing to take a struggle over a contract. The fight quickly went into decline when a number of workers at the plant began to act as though the union leadership was more of a problem than the plant boss.

Socialist workers misjudged the difference between workers just expressing anger about the concession contract offer and a layer of unionists who have decided to organize an effective fight against the company. At another plant, a local fraction member was almost fired because of moving too quickly to discuss revolutionary politics on the job before becoming established among co-workers.

Kennedy pointed out that in contrast to accurately reading the mood among co-workers and developments on the shop floor, "an ultraleft course can weaken our class in relation to the boss, or damage a fight--that is what happens today when workers take their fire off the boss and instead get into a confrontation with union officials who they think are not leading a fight properly."

If vanguard workers don't have a clear understanding of the relationship of class forces between the bosses and the workers, and how that has not yet changed fundamentally, it can lead to setbacks for workers in a plant, on a picket line, or a union-organizing drive, explained Paul Mailhot, who attended the meeting for the Socialist Workers Party Trade Union Committee. Communists can do more on the job than in many years, but that doesn't mean the bosses are especially weak.

The bosses and the government still have the upper hand and will continue to seize every opening to curtail democratic rights and push back union strength that workers need to organize. For example, socialists are often getting a good response to our ideas and receptivity to the Militant at many nonunion shops. But at the same time the cops and the bosses do their utmost to keep socialist workers from selling outside plants where they think workers through the course of reading the Militant will be attracted to the idea of a union.

The majority of organized units of socialist workers in garment and textile factories are sewing machine operators in the apparel industry. It is workers in the heart of production--on the jobs that the bosses depend on to extract their profits--who are pushed the hardest and feel the greatest weight from the drive for speed-up. It is these workers who are beginning to stand up to the employers' attacks against the working class.

In addition to the apparel industry, there are now socialist workers in textile mills in five cities, including in several mills in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Textile workers have a lot of striking power in the South, with more than 200,000 workers employed by textile manufacturers in North Carolina and Georgia alone. Recently there have been successful union-organizing drives at Fieldcrest-Cannon in Scottsboro, Alabama, and Rocky Mount, North Carolina, following the union victory at the giant textile plant in Kannapolis, North Carolina, in 1999.  
 
'The bosses make us work harder'
It is the capitalists' intensified exploitation of workers and farmers that is at the root of the growing labor resistance, remarked Ted Leonard, a textile mill worker from Lawrence, Massachusetts. He took up the argument raised in the capitalist media that U.S. business is increasing its profits and productivity through computers. "The bosses are making us work harder, and for less," said Leonard. "There are lots of computer terminals around the plant, but they do little to increase production themselves. Instead they are a tool for the company to keep an eye on us --keeping track of when we clock in and out and how much we are producing."

" 'Stretch-out' is what many workers are facing," not computerization, said Don Pane, a textile worker from Atlanta. "They have me operating multiple machines at the same time--people are running themselves ragged." The flip side of stretch-out is when bosses cut back on the workday, said sewing machine operator Nancy Rosenstock from New Jersey. She explained that "this is the big issue in my plant. They drive us to produce more with the piece-rate system and then send us home early." Rather than the producers of wealth benefiting from increased productivity, "workers share the misery" of smaller and smaller paychecks, said Rosenstock.

Romina Green said studying the Pathfinder book The Changing Face of U.S. Politics while working in a garment shop made clear why it is workers in production who will be in the forefront of battles with the bosses. This is one of the books workers and youth are reading for the socialist summer schools organized by branches of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. Green works in a plant near Birmingham, Alabama, that makes Nike jogging pants that sell for $40 a pair. "We only get six cents a pair for each operation sewing them," said Green. "It's easy to see why we should concentrate our forces in the production sewing jobs, because that is where wealth is produced for the capitalists."

There are increased opportunities to get the socialist newspapers the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books into the hands of workers, and greater openness to the ideas being presented through the Socialist Workers election campaigns. Mike Fitzsimmons, who works as a sewing machine operator in Cleveland, told the meeting that six of his co-workers came to a local restaurant after work to meet the Socialist Workers vice-presidential candidate Margaret Trowe recently. "There was a lot of interest in the ideas Trowe presented and experiences and news about the fightbacks taking place among workers across the country." Lisa Potash explained that circulating the Militant in the plant where she works helped convince some of her co-workers to walk the picket line with strikers from Five Star Laundry.

A Militant Labor Forum Saturday night presented a panel of speakers involved in labor battles. Angy Folkes, a worker on strike from Allied Health Care Products in St. Louis and a member of International Association of Machinists Local 1345, talked about the impact on her of the ongoing six-week strike at the health-care equipment company. "Every step of the way I've been surprised," said Folkes. "I was surprised at the vote to reject the contract, and the great conversations on the picket line discussing everything from capitalism to Cuba. And we've gotten stronger the longer we've been on the line."  
 
Role of immigrant workers
Rollande Girard, a garment worker from Miami, spoke at the forum on the victorious strike by 220 UNITE members against Tartan Textile, a commercial laundry, and the fight at RC Aluminum in Miami where workers are in a drive to organize the Iron Workers union. "The workers in these struggles are primarily immigrants, Haitians at Tartan Textile and Cubans at RC Aluminum," said Girard. "They're learning about the class struggle in this country. On the picket line at Tartan Textile, strikers sang songs from the fight against the Duvalier dictatorship, with the words changed to reflect their current struggle. In a real sense they are 'American' workers now, and they expose the lie that immigrants are willing to work for anything, thereby driving down wages and working conditions for others. If given a chance to fight many will be in the vanguard."

Girard explained the potential to carry out political activity in nonunion plants, like the one where she works as a sewing machine operator. Socialist workers in the plant got out information about the sit-down strike and union-organizing drive at Dakota Premium Foods in St. Paul, Minnesota, and decided this was also an opportunity to advance discussions on the need for a union at their own plant.

Workers there decided they should carry out an act of solidarity with the meat packers, said Girard, and gathered 13 signatures on a letter that says in part, "We just learned about your struggle for better working conditions and wages and for organizing a union. Your fight encourages us to do the same here. We face many of the same problems you do. We wish you victory."

The final speaker at the forum was Don Wilson, a coal miner from Colorado, who described the stakes involved in the UMWA strikes against the P&M coal company in the West. These strikes center on the key issues facing miners and other workers today--the fight to maintain the eight-hour day and wages, pensions, and medical care that meet today's needs. He said that five other contracts at UMWA mines in the Western coalfields expire at the end of August.

Participants at the weekend meetings were making plans to attend the July 27–29 Active Workers Conference in Oberlin, Ohio. The conference will bring together workers, farmers, and youth who are part of the growing resistance unfolding in the working class today to the brutality of capitalism, and present a way to go forward and increase their striking power.

Marty Ressler is a member of UNITE in southern Illinois and Mark Holland is a garment worker in Miami.