was their primary contact at the Center, and she recalls their anger about the situation:
Estela, a formidable woman in her forties, who had worked there for over a decade, told me how management had brought in new machines a year before shutting down in Chicago. “We taught them how to run those machines; they didn’t teach us. They sent us their so-called experts but their experts didn’t know how to run production, we knew how to run production. We were the ones who were there every day, not them. They were in the front office, drinking coffee. We showed them how to do it and then they took it away and went to teach it to someone else. They left us here with nothing, after we showed them how.”128
With a little prompting from STO, the women decided to fight the plant closure. They called a demonstration and distributed leaflets (again, written by the workers and printed by STO), which succeeded in getting the attention of Gateway’s management. The personnel officer contacted the Workers’ Rights Center and agreed to meet with Kingsley Clarke, the main attorney at the Center, to discuss the situation. Clarke was also a member of STO, and with his help Henson was able to gather the women for a sneak attack: when the Gateway manager arrived for his one-on-one, fifty angry, out-of-work women came in through the side door and cornered him. Under pressure, he offered the women jobs at a new factory Gateway was about to open. The new plant was an hour’s drive away, but as Henson remembers, “Kingsley and I thought it was a good offer and a kind of victory, but after some heated discussion, in a mixture of English and Spanish, the women refused. They even went so far as to tear up the contract we had drawn up.”129
Was this refusal a victory or a defeat? This vexing question can be asked about almost all the workplace efforts STO undertook. In this case, the women remained without work, and even their sense of collective power was short-lived. But, to quote Henson again,
I’d seen a glimpse of a new world in the way they gathered themselves together and cohered, with their affectionate teasing and the way they made room for one another, the way they surmounted their condition as wives and mothers, leaving their families to fend for themselves (the table set, dinner in the oven). One of them had been so resistant to her husband’s demand that she stay at home that the battle escalated into a petition for divorce. They became actors in the drama, lifted out of the daily routine. The struggle gave them a glimpse of power, a crack in a world whose order could be overturned. They had recognized again the way the company had exploited them, finally replacing them as if they were interchangeable units, and they had regained, too, their unity, discipline, and organization, brought about by the same common experience. I had never seen anything like it; it was a living demonstration of the development of the proletariat into a class. Our intervention had been incidental; we had provided only the frame and the occasion.130
Another such living demonstration was provided by a very different set of workers, the independent, owner-operator long-distance truck drivers, who went out on a several-day-long wildcat strike at the end of January and beginning of February 1974. The truckers were almost entirely white men, and in contrast to the women of Gateway, they each, theoretically, owned their own small businesses in the form of their cabs. Nonetheless, STO saw in the truckers’ strike a kernel of working-class autonomy and power that was not so dissimilar to that glimpsed by Henson in the context of the Gateway struggle.
By early 1974, inflation in the US was rapidly driving up the prices of a range of basic necessities, including food, utilities, and fuel.131 The last of these, the price of gas, was forced even higher by the Middle East conflict and the energy crisis of 1973. For owner-operator long-distance truckers, a small change in the price per gallon of diesel fuel made the difference between a comfortable profit and the threat of bankruptcy. In this context, a number of independent truckers’ organizations sprang up and demanded an immediate reduction in fuel prices. It may seem odd now that a price reduction could even be a negotiable demand, but in 1974 Nixon’s wage and price controls were a recent memory, so it did not seem impossible that the federal government would comply, if enough pressure was brought to bear. Pressure arrived on January 31, in the form of a nationwide shut down in long-distance trucking; across the country, truck stops filled up and didn’t empty out as drivers stopped their rigs wherever they happened to be on the chosen day.
Gary, Indiana was home to a major truck stop, and STO took full advantage of this proximity. In addition to the members of the organization who already lived in Gary, at least two Chicago-based STO members temporarily moved to the truck stop itself to work directly with the strikers. Predictably, one of the group’s first actions was to help the truckers design a poster, which was then printed on STO’s press. The poster showed a photo of an actual striker’s truck in the Gary truck stop, with a sign in the driver’s side window that read “Shut down or shut up! Jan. 31st until …”132 Around the photo were printed the words “Simon says … ‘Get ’em rolling!’ Truckers say … Hell NO!!” At the time, William Simon was the Federal Energy Czar and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and he designed the government’s response to the strike, which was to order the truckers back on the road, but allow them to charge their customers more in order to offset the high diesel prices.133 Many of the strikers opposed this because it would contribute to inflation and hurt working people across the board, whereas a reduction in the price of diesel would only inconvenience the oil companies. The “Simon Says” poster was distributed not only at the truck stop, but also to workers across Chicago, wherever STO had contacts. Talk Back also published a piece in late February entitled “TB Supports Truckers,” as a way of continuing the discussion among Stewart-Warner workers even after the strike had ended.134
In addition to printing the poster, STO members offered the truckers technical assistance on organizing meetings, and helped them make contact with women living in Gary whose husbands, brothers, or sons were truckers who had shut down in other parts of the country. As Carole Travis remembers, “We were trying to extend their own sense of their own power, and give them tools to extend it. That’s why we helped them come up with the idea of going to the community and using the radio to get women to come out who were from the area … even though maybe their husbands were in Missouri.”135 As the strike continued, pressure built on the truckers, both from the government—who had called out the National Guard in some states after strikers were accused of assaulting scab truckers who were still on the highways—and from families who were under greater economic strain the longer their husbands and fathers were away from home. In this context, STO members attempted to paint a bigger picture for the strikers, so that they could see the broader implications of their action. “So we would talk with them,” recalls Travis, “‘What are you doing? What do you hope for?’” These conversations had at least as much impact on STO as they did on the truckers themselves. Three decades later, according to Travis, “It’s hard to really even remember in some ways, but we felt like we were connected—and we were connected—to some workers who were spontaneously taking on the power structure, and acting … It was wonderful.”
STO was quite possibly the only left group in the United States to take the truckers’ strike seriously. For most other Marxists, the truckers weren’t of interest, largely because in traditional Marxist terms they weren’t part of the working class. Further, even if they were included in the proletariat, as white men they reflected a highly privileged stratum of the working class. None of this kept STO from recognizing the incredible potential of independent organization in the transportation industry. The strike dramatically impeded the normal operation of capitalism, with both factories and stores feeling the shortage of goods that were sitting idle in truck stops across the country. Several major auto plants shut down temporarily, as did a number of coal mines. In addition,
