The main report to the meeting was given by Chicago sewing machine operator Lisa Potash, a member of UNITE Local 39-C.

"We need to start with following the lines of resistance in the working class and small farmers as a whole," Potash said, "not limit our political focus strictly to developments in the industry we work in."

Potash explained that making the goals for the international drive to win new readers to the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and to sell Pathfinder’s new title Cuba and the Coming American Revolution and other Pathfinder pamphlets is essential to carrying out this perspective over the coming weeks.

Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists from 17 cities and towns across the United States participated in the meeting. A member of UNITE who is a leader of the Communist League from Toronto took part in the discussion.

The UNITE national fraction meeting coincided with a meeting of socialist coal miners and a meeting of the party’s national farm work committee. All the participants in these meetings were able to attend a special Militant Labor Forum here titled "Twenty-two years of the Iranian Revolution: Reportback from the Tehran International Book Fair," by Cindy Jacquith, a garment worker in Miami.

Potash quoted from The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes, which has been used as a guide to the SWP’s work in the unions since the party made a decision to concentrate its members in basic industry in the late 1970s.

"The party’s political work in the industrial unions takes as its starting point the world class struggle, the crisis of the international capitalist economy and imperialist world order, and their manifestations in this country. It is these forces that establish the conditions under which the struggle to defend, strengthen, and transform the unions takes place. It is only with this broader perspective--not the narrow framework of union politics--that the road can be charted toward constructing a class-struggle left wing in the labor movement, whose goal will be the transformation of the unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle against the employers and their government."  
 
Joining social struggles and strikes
Potash cited examples of how socialist workers in UNITE and other unions have been carrying out effective work in the weeks leading up to this fraction meeting.

Communists who are mine workers in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania began to carry out more effective political work as they moved deeper into the mining region and started relating to social issues and struggles beyond the mining industry, such as a fight by residents of a working-class neighborhood whose homes have been contaminated by leaking underground gasoline tanks, as well as the contract fight at the nearby Hollander Home Fashions plant. "As a result of this work in support of the Hollander strike," emphasized Potash, "a socialist mine worker joined a busload of strikers from Hollander who traveled to Baltimore on May 16 to support workers on strike at the Up-to-Date laundry.

"Racist discrimination and sexual harassment are among the deep social issues involved in the laundry workers’ strike," pointed out John Studer, a UNITE member from Philadelphia who also took part in the Baltimore rally. "We can dig into developments like this one and find vanguard workers who are interested in meeting others like themselves and discussing broader politics."

The second example Potash gave was the work done in Colorado with uranium miners and their spouses and other relatives who are demanding government compensation for the deaths and devastating health effects that the mine bosses and the government were responsible for. "A Militant sold to a student on campus led to contact with uranium miners who were friends of the student’s grandmother, a widow of a uranium miner. We went to have discussions with them, to get to know them better," she reported.

The wealthy mining bosses and the government that supports them in Washington turned their backs on these miners and their families, Potash said. But the workers have refused to roll over. Their resistance to these attacks sets an example for the current generation of fighters in the mining regions, who will face a similar onslaught from the employers as oil and natural gas drilling and coal-mining is expanded and safety regulations gutted under the government’s banner of raising energy supplies, stated Potash.

The discussion with the uranium miners and their families took up major questions, she said, from why the capitalist system only offers more devastation and no solutions to the problems working people face, the perspectives of the ultraright versus socialism, and the example of the Cuban Revolution. "This work led to sales of subscriptions, Pathfinder books, and some important political contacts we can do further work with," Potash said.

In mid-May UNITE members working at Hollander Home Fashions won their 10-week strike in Vernon, California, and two-week strike in Frackville, Pennsylvania. Workers at a Hollander plant in Tignall, Georgia, honored a picket line set up by strikers for the duration of the California strike.

"This was an important strike," Potash said. "The workers who went through it learned a lot about solidarity and emerged stronger, with more of a sense of themselves as part of a working class. Many members of our fraction across the country got involved. While this strike is now behind us, our timely response puts our party in a better position for when the next fight breaks out."

Following up with these workers to subscribe to the Militant, read books from Pathfinder, and attend the June 14–17 Active Workers Conference in Ohio is now the immediate challenge before socialists who became involved in this fight.

"We have the challenge in all of our national trade union fractions of becoming more competent discussing the main political questions being debated on the job," said Norton Sandler, who attended the meeting for the party’s Organization Bureau. "The so-called energy crisis is a prime example. The ruling-class’s answer being promoted by the administration in the White House with backing from some on both sides of the aisles of the Senate and House is more pollution from fossil fuels, less regulations, more dirty power plants. They have no plan to deal with the deadly waste produced by nuclear power."

Many in the trade union officialdom have been meeting with the White House on this and they are going to back this plan as well, claiming it will create many new jobs. This is the logic of their narrow framework of expanding the amount of dues money coming into the union coffers at the expense of fighting for social demands that are in the interest of the working class a whole, Sandler said.

He pointed to the section of the new Pathfinder title Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, containing immediate demands to advance the interests of the working class. "This is a program that answers the ‘America first’ nationalism of the union officials and their proposals to collaborate with ‘our companies’ to save ‘our jobs,’" Sandler said.  
 
Discussing social issues, energy crisis
Participants from several areas discussed the protests that have begun in many states over new laws that require workers to have a social security number in order to get a drivers license. This is a burning question for immigrant workers. "Many can only find day work because they don’t have a drivers license," said Jacquie Henderson, a sewer in Houston. "But this is a broader attack on the entire working class as well and we have to take it up that way. It’s a step toward imposing a national identity card, an expansion of the kind of police checks they want you to take for granted," she said.

Roberto Guerrero, a garment worker in New York and a leader of the Young Socialists, talked about protests in Brooklyn against the reopening of polluting coal-powered electrical generators in working-class neighborhoods where residents already suffer from high levels of asthma and other respiratory problems.

Two participants who work in different garment shops in the coal mining areas outside of Pittsburgh described the discussions in their workplaces over the effects of mining in those communities, from coal dust that covers everything, to mountain-top removal, to houses damaged by subsidence when the ground sinks because it’s been mined underneath.

Potash noted that a striker from Hollander Home Fashions in California who attended the national congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC) at the end of April was an example of the toughening vanguard that is developing in this country.

"We encourage other workers to go to Cuba for one reason: the example the Cuban Revolution gives of what workers and farmers can do when they take power," said Potash, who attended the CTC congress. She noted that socialist workers did not bring co-workers with them to that important event, although the interest she found at work when she returned showed that it would have been possible.

Over the next month, socialists will be seeking out young people in the industry who they can work with to participate in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange in July and the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students in Algeria in August. Participants at the meeting decided this is the best help they can give to the campaign under way to double the size of the Young Socialists this summer.  
 
Meeting subscription goals
North Carolina textile worker Naomi Craine initiated discussion on the second day of the meeting, emphasizing that selling Militant subscriptions to co-workers and garment workers we meet at factory gates, on picket lines, or at union conferences, is at the heart of carrying out the perspectives of this fraction meeting.

The fraction results so far in the subscription campaign don’t measure up to what’s objectively possible, Craine explained. This is why the immediate challenge at hand is to campaign over the next two weeks to make 100 percent of the national fraction’s goals of selling 35 subscriptions to the socialist newsweekly, the Militant, and 30 subscriptions to the Spanish-language Perspectiva Mundial, as well as selling 70 copies of the Pathfinder titles Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, and Pathfinder was Born with the October Revolution to fellow garment, textile, and laundry workers. At the same time, socialists in the industry will work to bring several of these workers to the Active Workers Conference, which the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists are sponsoring in Oberlin, Ohio, June 14-17.  
 
‘What Is to Be Done?’
Several participants in the discussion noted that sales of the socialist press and Pathfinder books are part of raising the broadest social and political questions enabling workers who are coming into struggle today to move beyond the level of trade union consciousness and see the need for workers and farmers to take political power.

They noted how this is explained in What Is to be Done by V.I. Lenin. Written in 1902, it is one of the founding documents of the Bolshevik party, which led the first successful socialist revolution 15 years later. Lenin argues in this book that workers cannot generalize the need to take power from economic struggles alone. Communists represent "the working class, not in its relation to a given group of employers alone but in its relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organized political force."

What Is to be Done? "is about building a vanguard party that can lead the working class to lead the vast majority to power, to be a tribune of the people," said Andrea Morell, a textile worker from Boston. "Our job is to be broadly politicizing ourselves, on the job and in every way."

Naomi Craine is a member of UNITE Local 1501 in North Carolina. Nan Bailey is a garment worker in Los Angeles.  
 
 
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