target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_a7be9213-ba74-5cd0-93a8-5fb72e81fbf5">110 Needless to say, the strike did not come off as planned. Beyond demonstrating STO’s initial naïveté concerning the immediate prospects for industrial organizing and revolution, these first efforts also clearly outline the group’s refusal to work within the established trade unions. While subsequent organizing work was less grandiose, it was no less confrontational.
For the most part, STO’s strategy took one of two approaches: either the group provided support to independent organizations as they developed in workplaces like Western Electric, or members of STO took jobs in specifically targeted factories and attempted to organize independent organizations directly, with and alongside other militant coworkers. The flagship factory for this sort of industrial concentration was the Stewart-Warner facility on the north side of Chicago, although similar efforts were made at Motorola, at the International Harvester Plant in Melrose Park (once the Chicago plant had closed), and in the steel mills of South Chicago and northwestern Indiana. In the early years, the organization was structured into multiple branches, and for a time each branch was associated with a major factory concentration, although in no case did every member of a branch work in the target plant.111 In each instance, however, several STO members obtained work in each factory and set about organizing rank and file groups that always included nonmembers as well.
The first part of building an industrial concentration was obtaining employment in the chosen factories. This was not always easy, especially for middle-class radicals with years of university experience in their recent past. Lies had to be told, job applications had to be fudged, and eyebrow-raising aspects of personal histories had to be rewritten for the benefit of hiring agents. When John Strucker, for example, applied for work at the Stewart-Warner factory, he needed to explain away the seven years he had spent pursuing his undergraduate and masters degrees full time. He concocted an elaborate tale, wherein he had completed high school but then had been obligated to take over the family hardware store in New Jersey when his father became ill. Being good with his hands but not much as a manager, the store had struggled for several years and eventually went under, after which he had headed to Chicago in search of factory jobs. This story was good enough to get him work as a lathe operator, a position he held for more than a decade. Early on, however, he was identified as a trouble-maker, and the company eventually researched his back story. Once they determined that no such hardware store had ever existed, management attempted to fire him. With help from STO’s contingent of lawyers, Strucker appealed his case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Upon consideration, the NLRB ruled in his favor, noting that although he had in fact lied on his job application, he had lied “down,” underplaying his credentials rather than overstating them.112
In the early seventies, the Stewart-Warner factory employed several thousand people, more or less evenly split between black, white, and latino (largely Puerto Rican) workers, of whom perhaps one half were women.113 The plant manufactured a variety of electrical components for use in cars, boats, and other vehicles. It had a range of military contracts that were lost in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.114 As many as a dozen STO members had jobs in various departments, and were thus able to slowly build a factory-wide presence for the group’s politics. (Many other radical groups also sent members to work at the plant, resulting in something of a hot-house for testing competing approaches.) The first step was the initiation of a shop newsletter called Talk Back, which was published at least occasionally for close to a decade, well after the last STO members still working at Stewart-Warner left the organization (but not the factory) in 1978. Initially, Talk Back was published and distributed anonymously to prevent the company from punishing those responsible. As time went on, however, the members began to publicly distribute the newsletter as a way to build solidarity within the factory. In addition, STO members also produced and distributed a range of stickers in and around the factory, which were used as propaganda and as morale boosters.
This initial phase of propaganda and semi-anonymous agitation was paralleled in all the plants where STO had a physical presence. Newsletters called Workers’ Voice were published and distributed at Melrose Park and at Motorola, where the name was later changed to Breakout!, and similar efforts were made elsewhere.115 All these publications shared a common approach, using to-the-point arguments and avoiding obscure political jargon, while stoking controversy whenever possible. Issues specific to particular departments were given as much coverage as plant-wide problems, in an attempt to broaden worker interest and solidarity. Particularly corrupt union officials and especially hated foremen and managers were routinely criticized, insulted, and mocked by name. Instances of collective worker action, be they spontaneous or well planned, were reported as models to emulate. But STO understood that the goal of publishing such shop sheets went beyond simply providing information to workers. Hamerquist worked at Stewart-Warner when Talk Back was first initiated, and in an early analysis of the group’s workplace efforts, he argued that “Since the function of leaflets and newsletters is not just general education or agitation, but to help create a base of independent organization, they must aim toward mobilizing the workers for certain specific struggles. It can easily happen that the literature can make threats, pledges, and calls to action that it can’t back up with a base of real strength. This hurts. When something is put on paper, the authors are committed to it; and if they can’t deliver, the credibility of their organizing work is damaged.”116
Recognizing this relationship between publications and organizing, an outside phone number or address was often included in the shop sheets, in an effort to include other interested workers. In most cases the newsletters either started out as or eventually became collaborative efforts rather than purely STO projects. This interactive aspect also allowed some of the publications to become limited forums for political debate, as when Talk Back printed a series of exchanges with a militant but racist worker who sent in letters criticizing working conditions in her or his department while also castigating Puerto Ricans for supposedly being lazy.117 This provided the STO members and editors of the newsletter an opportunity to challenge the white supremacy that characterized even more militant white workers.
Another aspect of STO’s approach to propaganda was the production of an agitational newspaper for mass distribution. Beginning in late 1970 with a single issue of Bread and Roses, a paper aimed specifically at working-class women, the organization consistently (if irregularly) distributed such newspapers to workers across the Chicago area until at least 1974. Bread and Roses depicted the struggles of working mothers, reported on labor struggles at a variety of hospitals, analyzed the causes of inflation, retold the history of the IWW-led textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 that popularized the demand for “bread and roses,” and criticized mainstream labor unions as unresponsive to the needs of women workers. In an editorial statement, the group popularized its views on unions and on white supremacy: “If we are ever going to get anywhere, white women must support the struggles of black and Latin workers for an end to racism and for equality. We cannot rely on the existing unions to fight for us. The unions do nothing for women workers. They are content to let us work for slave wages. They don’t care if we are excluded from the better jobs. They don’t even fight for our job security.”118 The paper also contained a four-page section in Spanish. Apart from the exclusive emphasis on women workers, Bread and Roses set the pattern for most of the agitational publications put out under STO’s name over the next several years.
The group’s next agitational paper was the Insurgent Worker, which was published regularly as a tabloid-size paper in 1971 and 1972, and sporadically in magazine size during the next two years. During 1973, STO members in Gary published the smaller and more Indiana-focused Calumet Insurgent Worker, which primarily covered news from the steel mills as well as other workplaces
