In mid-October, 250 workers at a commercial laundry in Oceanside, New York, walked off the job for three days and won recognition of UNITE as their union. They are fighting for better pay, improved working conditions, and an end to abusive treatment by the bosses. Through their strike, they also kicked out a previous company-backed "union."

Laundry workers have won other strike victories nationally, including in Chicago and Miami. Some 1,600 laundry workers in Las Vegas voted for representation by UNITE in September. An organizing drive is now under way at Royal Airlines Laundry in Chicago. Militants from several union textile plants and laundries have traveled to other cities to participate in organizing drives and strikes of other workers in their industry. According to the fall 2000 issue of the UNITE magazine, some 25,000 commercial laundry workers now belong to the union, out of an overall membership of 250,000.

Earlier this year textile workers at Pillowtex plants in Scottsboro, Alabama, and Rocky Mount, North Carolina, voted to join UNITE. This follows the June 1999 unionization victory at the Pillowtex (formerly Fieldcrest Cannon) mills in the Kannapolis, North Carolina, area. More than 9,000 workers at 16 Pillowtex plants throughout the South are now organized by UNITE. Many of these plants are located in areas with large concentrations of mills.

In early October, 25 cutters at Jae Young, a women's apparel shop in Queens, New York, shut down their machines and marched into the boss' office wearing UNITE caps to demand union recognition. They won this demand and are now preparing for contract negotiations.

Over the last couple of years, the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists have concentrated on deepening work among workers in meatpacking, mining, and the garment and textile industries, building fractions of socialist workers in UNITE, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Workers in these industries and unions are in the forefront of resisting the capitalist rulers' attacks on health and safety, lengthening of the workday, increasing pace of work, and wages.  
 
Part of 'American' working class
"As workers from Latin America, Asia, and the rest of the world are drawn into the plants, they also become part of the 'American' working class, often bringing experiences with them from struggles in their home countries," Kennedy explained. "They have taken their place as part of the vanguard in many of the organizing drives and shop-floor skirmishes taking place in garment, textile, and other industries."

As they draw in labor from around the world, the bosses and their government increase the use of the immigration cops and border patrol to brutalize and attempt to intimidate this layer of the working class. Garment workers, often organized in contingents by UNITE, have been part of actions in defense of immigrant rights. Jorge Ledesma, a sewing machine operator in a nonunion shop in New York's garment district, reported that he joined other garment workers on a UNITE-sponsored bus to the October 15 vigil protesting the rightist assault on immigrant workers in Farmingville, New York.

Another reflection of the growing weight of immigrant workers in the labor movement is the policy shift of the AFL-CIO to support a call for amnesty, which would give legal papers to many immigrants who have been in the United States for several years.

Meeting participants described some of the skirmishes taking place in their own plants that further dispel myths promoted by the bosses and many trade union officials who claim that garment workers are conservative, and that workers who are immigrants or who are women are afraid to fight. Nancy Rosenstock, a member of UNITE Local 506 in New Jersey, described how workers at the Individualized Shirt plant where she works turned to the union to respond to the company's threat to cut health benefits, and its decision to replace a 20-cent raise with a lump-sum bonus pegged to productivity.

"The majority of workers at my plant are from Mexico and countries in South and Central America." explained Rosenstock. "One afternoon about 40 workers gathered in the cafeteria on break and started banging on the tables to protest what the company was doing. They only stopped after the union representative agreed to hold a union meeting to discuss what to do."

Kerri Foster, a garment worker at a plant in a western Pennsylvania coal mining town, said that probes by the company to fire a worker and lengthen the probationary period for others had been pushed back by the workers. In coal mining regions, the fights in the garment shops and the emerging social movement to defend miners' health and safety and their union, the UMWA, reinforce each other, she said.

Don Hammond, a textile worker in North Carolina, described his discussions with textile workers in UNITE who marched in the Labor Day parade in Charlotte. Many marchers came from the Pillowtex plant in Kannapolis and spoke with confidence about confronting favoritism, racial discrimination, and other injustices by the company.  
 
Branches in workers districts
"A major question facing every branch of the party today is locating our headquarters and rooting our political activity in workers districts," reported Alyson Kennedy, opening discussion on the second day of the fraction meeting. "Today we can leverage our sales of the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and revolutionary literature by Pathfinder through regular weekly sales in workers' neighborhoods where we're based. This consistent work transforms the possibilities for utilizing the Militant Labor Forums, classes on the basics of Marxism, the Pathfinder bookstores, and the possibilities of recruitment to the revolutionary movement.

"We are placing ourselves in workers districts, among the sections of workers who are forging a new proletarian vanguard," continued Kennedy. "This is based entirely on the conviction that we will recruit militant workers we meet at weekly sales tables to the revolutionary party and Young Socialists."

"The Garment District branch is located right in the heart of hundreds of garment shops in midtown Manhattan. But locating our branch there is just the beginning," said Ruth Robinett. "In the last several weeks, we have begun systematically setting up propaganda tables in the district and are starting to meet individual workers for a second and third time. Some have visited our bookstore a block or two away from where we set up our tables." Robinett said it was only through this course of activity that the branch can choose how to allocate its members to participate in social protest actions taking place in the city.  
 
Socialist election campaign
Meeting participants discussed utilizing the final stretch of the Socialist Workers campaign and the week following to reach their goals in selling the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning and subscriptions to the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

"What have eight years of the Clinton administration meant for working people?" asked Jack Willey, participating in the meeting on behalf of the SWP Political Committee. The Democratic president took the first steps toward the dismantling of Social Security, with the elimination of Aid for Families with Dependent Children. His administration has overseen the increasing use of the death penalty, police forces, and immigration cops to attempt to strike fear into working people. It has taken big steps toward trying to achieve first-strike nuclear capacity for U.S. imperialism, through so-called missile defense systems, and carried out military assaults around the world from Iraq to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere. And together with Congress, the Clinton administration has implemented several measures to substantially tighten the U.S. embargo against revolutionary Cuba. We can be sure the next president will continue along this course, Willey explained.

The Working-Class and the Transformation of Learning explains how these attacks are inherent to the capitalist system, and discusses the revolutionary struggle needed by workers and farmers to transform society. Together with the news and analysis of the class struggle internationally that appears in the Militant and the Spanish-language magazine Perspectiva Mundial, it is an invaluable tool for workers to broaden their political scope.

Nine garment and textile workers are Socialist Workers candidates in the federal elections. Lisa Potash took her campaign for U.S. Congress to the picket lines of strikers at the Five Star Laundry in Chicago this summer. That experience, and her active role in building solidarity at Hartmarx, where she works, for the strikes by laundry workers won a very open reception for her campaign among co-workers. Two workers from her plant came to hear Potash and SWP presidential candidate James Harris at a campaign meeting in Chicago October 14. One of these workers had also joined the candidates at a protest in defense of immigrant rights earlier that day.

Supporters of Alyson Kennedy's campaign for U.S. Senate sold the Militant and handed out a campaign statement against police brutality outside the garment shop where she works in St. Louis. This opened the door for deepening political discussions with several co-workers, she explained.

Meeting participants discussed the invaluable role of the election campaigns to speak to developments in world politics, like the unfolding resistance by Palestinians against Israeli repression and the recent revolt against the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia.

Also discussed was another important proletarian task for all units of the communist movement--to leverage the legacy and continuity of Marxism. That is, placing Pathfinder books in bookstores and libraries to make them more accessible to workers, farmers, and youth. Participants noted that several co-workers who regularly read Pathfinder books would be interested in working together with socialists to expand the reach of communist propaganda into more outlets in the region.

The weekend's meeting included participation in a special Militant Labor Forum titled, "The Cuban revolution: An example for Workers and Farmers in the U.S. Today." Consuelo Elba Alvarez and Katia de Llano spoke of their experiences as young participants in the revolutionary struggle that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba in 1959. Both are members of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, which works to educate young people in Cuba about their revolutionary heritage and recruit them to the ongoing struggle to build socialism. Alvarez and de Llano were joined on the platform by Joel Britton, a UFCW packinghouse worker and leader of the Socialist Workers Party. He spoke about the impact of the opening years of the Cuban revolution on winning young people like himself in the 1960s to the fight to overthrow capitalism in the United States and revolutionary Cuba's continuing example for growing numbers of workers and farmers today.  
 
Advances in fraction-building
The meeting registered important steps forward in building a fraction in garment and textile since the last national meeting in July. Under a report by Lisa Potash, participants discussed several lessons in gaining competence and holding jobs as sewers.

"A combined effort of targeted sales of our press, training on sewing skills to give us the confidence to hold jobs in the garment district, and a systematic effort to find those jobs, has earned us a much better understanding of where we want to be," said Jason Alessio, a sewing machine operator from the New York garment district. "We now know about several union-organized shops in the district," he said. Socialist workers have also turned to the union for information on hiring in UNITE shops and to find out about events like the Farmingville rally.

Socialists hailed from 12 cities across the country. In nine factories, two or more socialists are working together in a plant to more effectively carry out political activity. Every fraction member is working in a production job, the big majority as sewing machine operators, which is the heart of garment production. This puts the national fraction on a sound footing to deepen its involvement in the resistance taking place on the shop floor where they work, in other garment and textile plants, and in other unions.