Sadlowski won national prominence in 1974 when he wrested the directorship of the Chicago-Gary district, the largest in the USWA, from the bureaucracy's handpicked candidate.

Now Sadlowski has launched a nationwide movement called Steelworkers Fight Back. Its avowed purpose is to restore democratic, rank-and-file control over the steelworkers union so it can fight effectively for the needs of working people.

This campaign inside the 1.4 million-member steelworkers union will have repercussions throughout the entire trade union movement.

It is a fight that deserves support from all steelworkers and other unionists who want to see--in Sadlowski's words--"a tough, democratic labor movement."

In a widely circulated letter appealing for support to Steelworkers Fight Back, Sadlowski describes the purpose of the new movement:

"We are determined to eliminate the kind of tuxedo unionism some of our leaders have practiced in the past. We want to give our union back to the membership; and we're determined to make our union the kind of progressive political force its founders intended it to be."  
 
February 19, 1951
The auto barons are employing the lowest scum of the underworld to intimidate and brutally assault union men and women and wreck the unions, it was revealed last week in Detroit hearings conducted by the Senate Crime Investigating Committee (Kefauver Committee).

In the course of this Senate rackets-investigation, the "respectable" auto industrialists have been linked with a plot to protect their profits by hiring gangsters to commit violence against workers.

Not since the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee investigation in 1937 has the truth been told about the unremitting war of the auto corporations against unionism. At those hearings it was revealed that in 1936 the big corporations, including 28 automobile companies, spent $80,000,000 on the labor spy racket.

The Kefauver Committee held only a hasty two-day open hearing. But this was sufficient to expose the conspiracy between the Briggs Manufacturing Company and a gang of thugs hired in 1945 to beat up union workers.

The 1945 beatings suffered by the pioneer auto union builder Genora Dollinger, Michigan Trotskyist leader, and three other union militants, have now been definitely traced to the Briggs Company which in 1945 hired a notorious gangster for anti-union work under cover of a million dollar contract to collect scrap.  
 
 
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