Vol. 80/No. 10 March 14, 2016
Anti-labor outfit targets ATI workers and their union
As the fight has worn on, a notorious anti-labor outfit calling itself the Socialist Equality Party has persistently shown up, appealing for workers to turn against the union, weakening their fight against the steel bosses.
The Michigan-based group and its World Socialist Web Site tells workers they should quit the USW, saying the union is the same as the company. Their latest pitch, “USW Agrees to Sellout Deal to End ATI Lockout,” says the Steelworkers union “deliberately isolated the embattled ATI workers.”
The Socialist Equality Party isn’t active in the unions and doesn’t build solidarity. It’s not part of the movement for $15 and a union or other organizing efforts. It tells workers the unions — which it calls “auxiliary arms of corporate management” — are part of a conspiracy with the employers and urges us to quit them.
As hard-fought battles drag on, they seek the ear of workers who get frustrated or demoralized. Their demands for us to walk away from our unions are a deadly threat to workers seeking to strengthen the labor movement to fight more effectively.
This anti-union outfit has a long history of disruption aimed at workers engaged in often bitter battles and at revolutionary working-class organizations like the Socialist Workers Party.
When Cooper Tire bosses in Findlay, Ohio, locked out Steelworkers for three months in 2011-12, the World Socialist Web Site published the so-called Cooper Tire Worker Newsletter, whose diatribes against the union were quoted by tire bosses’ publications.
In recent years this group slandered unions in battles at Caterpillar in Illinois; Con Edison in New York; and American Crystal Sugar in North Dakota and Minnesota. In 2015 they targeted Steelworkers on strike at oil refineries.
It is through hard-fought struggles that existing unions will be transformed into fighting instruments and a stronger, revolutionary-minded leadership will emerge. A good example of this is found in the four-book series on the 1930s Midwest Teamsters organizing drives written by Farrell Dobbs, the central leader of that fight and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
Communist dockworkers and drivers — members of the Socialist Workers Party and its predecessor organizations — helped lead an organizing drive that expanded the Teamsters union in Minneapolis and transformed it into a militant industrial union. Through a series of hard-fought battles against the bosses and their cops and goons, the Teamsters union grew and turned Minneapolis into a union town. A growing confident rank-and-file leadership emerged, capable of organizing an 11-state over-the-road campaign in the Midwest.
They helped publish the Northwest Organizer, the paper of the area labor movement, that pointed to the need for workers to mount independent working-class political action as well as building support for battles on the picket line.
Related articles:
Steelworkers stood up to ATI lockout, say ‘the bosses underestimated us’
On the Picket Line
California Cartage workers rally for better conditions
Fight against frame-up of rail workers wins support
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