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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 in Gary and the surrounding area. All these papers 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

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