featured news STO considered to be of interest to working-class people, including updates on rank-and-file struggles at factories across the United States and abroad, advice on dealing with the legal aspects of on-the-job conflicts such as National Labor Relations Board hearings and unemployment claims, and analysis of major news stories like the wage and price controls instituted by Nixon in 1971, the prison uprising at Attica, and the course of the war in Vietnam.119
The distribution of shop sheets and agitational newspapers was a common tactic for seventies leftists involved in workplace organizing, and there is no evidence that STO was any more successful than, for example, the October League, either at integrating workers into their papers’ preparation or at tying them to specific struggles. The distinctiveness of STO’s approach to the workplace became more clear when, building upon the initial work of producing shop sheets, in-plant efforts graduated to supporting and even initiating organizing efforts within the factory.120 These campaigns ran the gamut from small-scale attempts to remove particularly mean-spirited or racist foremen to plant-wide struggles around improving working conditions and health and safety precautions. Three elements helped clarify the differences between STO’s efforts and those of the OL, the RU, and other groups involved in factory work.
First, one common example of left work in factories was missing from the STO approach: attempts to change the union leadership. In contrast to other left groups that focused their efforts on developing oppositional caucuses that could challenge corrupt union bureaucrats, STO argued that the institution of the trade union was itself the problem, and that changing the names on the leadership slate would, at best, have no effect, or, at worst, make workers even more complacent than they had previously been. At Stewart-Warner, for example, Talk Back mocked the inner-union caucus efforts by promoting a garbage can, “Filthy Billy” Trash, as a “CANdidate” for president of the local.121
This abstention, which was criticized by skeptics both inside and outside STO, extended even to the level of departmental steward, which represented to many leftists both a winnable and a meaningful position in the union hierarchy. Stewards have responsibility for pursuing worker grievances, and the choice between a responsive steward and a corrupt one can make the difference between success and failure in any number of meaningful on-the-job crises. Nonetheless, STO’s critical perspective on trade unions led the group to decide that no STO member could run for steward, although members did sometimes support, and shop sheets periodically reported on, the candidacies of militant coworkers.122 As we shall see, this position did not go unchallenged within the group as the seventies progressed.
Of course, not all workplaces were unionized. In nonunion plants, a different set of problems presented themselves, but the contrast between STO and other left groups attempting to organize workers remained. At the Motorola factory on the west side of Chicago, for example, STO members were involved in the creation of the Motorola Organizing Committee and the publication of the newsletter Breakout! For a group like the International Socialists this might have been a prelude to an organizing drive to bring in a progressive but mainstream union and demand a first contract. But even after several years of activity in the plant, the editors of Breakout! could write: “We do not work for any union. We are not against unions, but mostly we are for people fighting the company.”123 Just as in unionized factories, the STO members at Motorola didn’t think unions were a productive way to fight the company, so they never attempted to bring one in.
Another major difference between STO’s approach and that of other left groups committed to industrial concentration related to the kinds of demands that were put forward in organizing projects. Many left groups pushed campaigns that promised to improve working conditions for all workers equally, such as across-the-board pay raises, in a version of the argument that a rising tide lifts all boats. STO members, by contrast, involved themselves first and foremost in struggles to improve the situations of the most oppressed workers, typically minorities and women. For example, the Talk Back group helped coordinate an eventually successful campaign at Stewart-Warner to eliminate a particular pay grade that was being used by the management as an excuse to pay black and Puerto Rican women significantly less than white women for similar work.124 Organizing workers around this demand meant convincing the majority of the workers—all men and white women—to back a demand that had no immediate effect on their working conditions. The arguments advanced by STO members and their allies in campaigns like this were both moral and strategic, and, win or lose, they helped define the approach taken by STO to workplace organizing.
The third key difference between STO’s work in factories and that of other left groups concerned recruitment. All Leninist organizations agreed on the need to create a new and truly revolutionary party that could serve as the vanguard of all struggles against capitalism; this included STO, which had made party-building a part of its initial self-conception as far back as 1969. Further, all these groups recognized that any such party needed to be demographically representative of the working class it claimed to represent. For the OL, the RU, and most other New Communist groups, this implied a significant emphasis on recruitment of workers, and especially nonwhite workers, to their organizations. For STO, however, the defense of workers’ autonomy implied in the critical view of the trade unions meant that the involvement of workers in independent organizations in the workplace was not normally a first step toward recruitment into the group, but first and foremost a way to build the experience and self-confidence of workers. Further, the analysis of white supremacy and white skin privilege led STO to be even more leery of attempts to recruit workers of color (or “third world workers” as they were commonly known in the seventies).125 In the end, few people joined STO directly from the shop-floor, and of those who did, almost none maintained their membership for longer than a year or two.126 On the whole, STO was less interested in recruitment than in supporting the autonomy of the working class. Thus, the group attempted to intervene in struggles that it believed might eventually result in the creation of a revolutionary party in the United States, but it did not generally consider itself the organizational kernel around which that party would develop.
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This emphasis on autonomy was also reflected clearly in the effort the Sojourner Truth Organization put into supporting independent rank-and-file struggles in workplaces where the group had no physical presence, like the cable plant at the Western Electric factory in Cicero. STO intervened, in its unique fashion, in dozens of such workplace campaigns, attempting in every case to aid in the creation of the same independent mass workers’ organizations that were mentioned previously. In addition to the twister department experience, two other examples provide substantial insight into the successes and failures of the organization’s approach: the Gateway struggle and the nationwide independent truckers’ strike of 1974.
Gateway Industries ran a small factory on the southeast side of Chicago that for unknown reasons manufactured the odd pairing of dishwasher detergent and seatbelts.127 In many ways, the plant was the opposite of a factory like Stewart-Warner: it was small (seven hundred employees at most), it had never been unionized, the workers were almost entirely immigrant women from Mexico, and STO had no physical presence in the plant at any time. STO members who operated a Workers’ Rights Center in the neighborhood made initial contact with disgruntled former workers at the plant. The Center was primarily a legal clinic where workers from the surrounding community could get free advice from sympathetic lawyers and paralegals, who were members of STO. Among other programs, volunteers at the Workers’ Rights Center helped people who had recently been laid off apply for unemployment benefits. In this process, STO members encountered a number of Mexican women who had been put out
