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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 of work when the Gateway factory closed its doors in preparation for a move to Mexico. Then-member Beth Henson 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

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