I agree with the gist of David's comments. The 1976-1977
"Steelworkers Fightback" campaign for leadership of the USWA led by Ed
Sadlowski was the "real beginning of the SWP's turn". Sadlowski had
been president of US Steel South Chicago USWA Local 65 since 1964.
Steelworkers Fight Back developed during Sadlowski's campaign to be
director of USWA District 31 of the Chicago-Gary, Indiana area, the
USWA's largest district (Sadlowski lost the initial Feb. 1973 election
which was found to be corrupt by the U.S. Labor Department; Sadlowski
won the rerun election in November 1974). Sadlowski lost the Feb.
1977 USWA presidential election because of general u.s. capitalist
opposition and the USWA establishment's dominance in Canada and the
southern U.S.
The Salt Lake City branch of the SWP actively supported the
Sadlowski/SFB campaign. I have a vivid memory of participating in a
Sadlowski/SFB rally lit by fire and torches in the January or February
winter evening dark at the famous Bingham Canyon ('Kennecott Copper')
open pit mine (where Joe Hill had once organized). Ed Mayne, the
popular young president of USWA Local 485 at Kennecott, endorsed and
introduced Sadlowski who gave a rousing campaign speech.
Below, links to a recent three-part review/analysis of the
Steelworkers Fightback campaign by a former SWP member.
Dayne
Learning and Building on the past: Notes from the Sadlowski Campaign
for USWA President in 1976-77
by Garrett Brown, Stansbury Forum, June 28, 2023
https://stansburyforum.com/2023/06/28/learning-and-building-on-the-past-notes-from-the-sadlowski-campaign-for-uswa-president-in-1976-77
Notes from the Sadlowski Campaign for USWA President in 1976-77Part 2
– David v. Goliath in the USWA
by Garrett Brown, Stansbury Forum, July 2, 2023
https://stansburyforum.com/2023/07/02/notes-from-the-sadlowski-campaign-for-uswa-president-in-1976-77part-2-david-v-goliath-in-the-uswa
Looking Back at the Steelworkers Fight Back Campaign – Part 3:
Strengths and Weaknesses of Steelworkers Fight Back
by Garrett Brown, Stansbury Forum, July 5, 2023
https://stansburyforum.com/2023/07/05/looking-back-at-the-steelworkers-fight-back-campaign-part-3
On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 7:34 AM David Walters
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> [Edited Message Follows]
>
> I will comment on this. I was for about 6 months also in the Kansas City, MO
> Branch when Mark was there. The soliloquy of events *started* with the
> 1976Steel Workers Fight Back campaign. That was the real beginning of the
> SWP's turn. While it did "start" at Chicago's South Works (Mark, I believe it
> was actually smaller than your plant) and the huge and super large U.S. Steel
> plant in Gary, Indiana (plant was a damn near 5 miles long!) it was a
> national campaign even outside of what we call "Basic Steel", that is the
> iron ore into finished steel. At that time they were still hot rolling steel
> in downtown Pittsburgh (Jones & Laughlin). The Fight Back campaign was indeed
> quite national. There were Fight back groups of rank and filers in *most* but
> not all Basic Steel sectors of the industry and as many in non-Basic Steel
> (the Steelworkers Union had organized many manufacturing jobs such as
> canneries and even some large chain coffee shops in NYC!).
>
> Mark probably got from my my off the cuff analysis of the SWP's "campaign
> party" nonsense that developed out of the stupendous anti-war work the SWP
> did in the 1960s and early 1970s where the entire party was turned into an
> anti-Vietnam war machine. This is when the national campaign party nonsense
> started to develop where the success, for example, of the Lower East Side
> branch of the SWP in NY during the campaign for "bi-linguel/bi-cultural"
> school board campaign was successful and the SWP became literally the
> headquarters for the 2 communities in question, Puerto Rican and Chinese,
> against the right-wing United Federation of Teachers. From this the SWP
> "analysis" dictated a "turn toward the communities" which in 100% of the
> practice mean simply moving one's headquarters into the communities of the
> oppressed but ignoring actual struggles going there. Unlike, for example, the
> CPUSA which allowed their branches to also engage in local struggles, the SWP
> ignored them if it was part of the "National Campaign". The SWP suffered
> unknowingly from this idiotic strategy.
>
> The same applied to union struggles that Mark also touched on. In NYC there
> are union locals with over 30,000 members. One such was the very radical
> Hospital Workers Local 1199. During the 60s and 70s this lone NYC local (the
> national union was an old "red union" called the Retail, Wholesale, and
> Distributive Workers of America or the RWDWA. In otherwords a small warehouse
> and retail union that existed only the NE of the U.S.) it actually mobilized
> 10s of thousands of it's own members to march for civil rights and against
> the war. The union was dominated by Black, Puerto Rican, Dominican and
> immigrant works. The SWP did have a fraction inside it but when the turn to
> garment workers was announced, it dissolved the fraction to go into it
> because it was part of the "national campaign". Many of us questioned and
> opposed this but were shutdown. We didn't oppose an orientation toward
> garment workers but we didn't believe that dissolving the ONE fraction we
> actually recruited out of and had massive rank and file involvement was
> correct. And that was true increasingly into the 1980s as well. Very sad.
>
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