The Brooklyn Rail

This story is excerpted from a longer work, titled We Wanted to Change Everything, which is an account of the author’s years as an activist and member of the Sojourner Truth Organization from the early 1970s to 1983.

In the mid-1970s, in Chicago, there was still a labor movement. There were seven steel mills nearby, there were auto plants and concentrations of workers for whom the 1960s were not peace and love but wildcat strikes and contentions on the shop floor, bypassing the official unions. In the Labor Newsletter of the National Lawyers Guild we ran stories on strikes, discrimination cases, and consent decrees. The Black-led Detroit Rebellion of 1967 brought the 82nd Airborne Division back from Vietnam to quell the insurrection—they were gentler than the police—and gave birth to the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, part of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The Independent Truckers Strike shut down shipping from coast to coast. The Farah garment workers, young Chicanas, won their strike in El Paso through a national campaign. Chicago was home to hundreds of thousands of industrial workers, who were, in Marx’s words, “disciplined, united, organized by the mechanism of capitalist labor.” We could still construct a political program based on workers at the point of production, whose brain and muscle created tangible goods.

In the spring of 1976, Val Klink and I formed a legal collective downtown with Kingsley Clarke from the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), the revolutionary communist group that we were close to. Kingsley had a law office on 88th and Commercial in South Chicago as well. I worked as a paralegal and was an officer in the local National Lawyers Guild chapter; I carried two briefcases, one for legal and one for political work. Val was a lawyer I had previously worked with when he partnered with his cousin, who was also active in the Guild, a group of radical lawyers, law students, jailhouse lawyers, and paralegals. We began every office meeting by reading Mao, On Contradiction.

Kingsley and I shared a cavernous room with a cement floor and big storefront windows in South Chicago, two blocks from the gates of US Steel. South Chicago was grimy, with blocks of bungalows, menudo on weekends, and a thrift store opposite the bank. It was an espresso-free zone, but the train connected it to Hyde Park and downtown. In segregated Chicago, South Chicago was the one working-class district where Black, Mexican, and white folks lived more or less together. Our clients had real estate problems, contract disputes, and custody battles, a litany of tedious and intractable difficulties, exacerbated by the massive layoffs of the mid-1970s. Many had been employed by local steel mills.

It was a neighborhood of single-family homes that represented a tentative, reversible step towards respectability, achieved by doubling up on shifts, by mothers leaving their babies to work in sweatshops, by sons going into the mills a week after high school graduation. The little houses, scrubbed inside and out, were the defense against a return to dying villages in Zacatecas or the South. From stoop labor in the fields to shoveling coal into blast furnaces, from the sun-blasted plantation to the cold northern winter, folks intended to advance. They came to industry late, resented by white workers who were determined to reserve the privilege of exploitation to those with white skin, and they were subject to the iron law of seniority: last hired, first fired.

Neither the workers nor we who called ourselves revolutionaries could see that the recession of the mid-seventies was more than a temporary pause, but we could see its differential impact. A white recession is a black depression. The white workers who followed their fathers into the mills, who fought to keep Mexicans and Afro-Americans out, retired with full pensions. They bought homes in neighborhoods favored by banks, with better schools; they used the equity of those homes to send their children to college. The recently hired did not have the home that represented an appreciable sum of family wealth.

We did not foresee the permanence of that recession, or that US Steel’s mile-long facilities along the lakefront would soon lie vacant. We did not see that the core of our politics—that relations established at the point of production foreshadow a new social order—would be undermined by the transformation of the industrial proletariat into petty criminals, cubicle slaves, and service workers. In that South Chicago storefront, blackened by soot from the furnaces, I discovered a whole new world, just as that world was passing away.

The Guild Labor Committee established two Workers Rights Centers: one in West Town, the Puerto Rican neighborhood on the near north side, and the other in South Chicago, where we worked from a neighborhood settlement house on Commercial Avenue. I spent several afternoons a week there, sitting at a long table in the back of a storefront staffed by affable Mexican-American social workers. Many of the people who came to see us had trouble collecting their unemployment benefits, extended by federal order but backed up in local offices. Most of them were Mexican and preferred to speak Spanish. I had a bilingual intake form which I labored through: “¿Cuál es su dirección? ¿Su número de seguridad social? (What is your address? your social security number?)”

The office assigned me an interpreter, but she hung back. The workers caught on that we did not work for the government and they were delighted to teach me Spanish, interpreting for each other, crowding together and telling me about strikes, working conditions, battles with city bureaucrats. The same people came every week, bringing their friends; they let newcomers come forward so I could fill out their forms, then resumed the same animated discussions. There were a few men, laid off by the mills, but it was the women who returned to tell me about the Mexican Revolution and the 1906 strike at the Cananea copper mine.

At the Center, a story began to emerge. Nearly all the women had worked at the same plant, Gateway Industries, making seat belts, and Pink Lady dish soap in a nearby factory. The previous Thanksgiving, Gateway had given their seven hundred seat belt workers two weeks’ notice and taken the machines to Agua Prieta, Sonora, on the northern border of Mexico, where the plant became a maquiladora. The detergent division, which employed only a handful of workers, stayed behind. Many of the former seatbelt workers had left the area or gotten jobs in other shops but some remained and were nearing the end of their extended unemployment benefits. The long vacation was drawing to a close, many of their husbands were also laid off and jobs were scarce. Their indignation with Gateway burst out anew.

They had been dismissed during the holiday season and lost their Christmas bonuses just when the need was greatest. The plant had gone to Mexico. The move was prepared in secrecy and caught them by surprise. Their union, the Teamsters, did not even warn them of the closing. But most of all, they were angry at being discarded “like garbage.”

Ramona, a formidable woman in her forties who had worked there over a decade, told us how management brought in new machines one year before shutting down in Chicago.

When I first came here, we worked by hand. Then they brought in machines but 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.

Ramona and the others had organized a sit-down strike shortly after mastering the new machines. The one-day protest raised their pay by a dollar an hour.

Everyone was with us, even the men in maintenance. We all went to the cafeteria and were singing songs, making speeches, standing on the tables. Even the kitchen workers joined us. We got what we wanted, but they could see we were strong, we were united, so they knew they had to get rid of us. And they did. What can we do? When we win, we lose.

Kingsley showed me his research. He had attended the community meeting when the layoffs were first announced and he wasn’t surprised that feelings ran deep. We pondered what to demand. Reopen the plant was impossible, but should we ask for it anyway? What did it mean to demand jobs—what was a job, a return to exploitation and subservience? The women were magnificent. They should be running the plant, as they knew. What did they want?

We called a meeting, moving it out of the settlement house and into our office. The women wanted their jobs back. They discussed whether the plant should come back from Mexico or simply reopen here with new machines. After some argument, they agreed that “the Mexican workers are our brothers and sisters, let them keep their jobs.” Since Gateway still had offices and an operating division in Chicago, they decided to boycott Pink Lady Dish Detergent to pressure for the seatbelt plant’s reopening. They agreed to a demonstration at the plant and named a Saturday several months away.

We put together a leaflet, with lines crossing out a picture of the detergent and a paragraph summarizing Gateway’s unjust treatment of its workers. I joined a delegation and we visited the merchants on Commercial Avenue; they agreed to pull the product and post the leaflet. By the time we reached the end of the first block, word had raced ahead and the product was gone.

I met with Linda from the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo-Hermandad General de Trabajadores  (Center for Autonomous Social Action–General Brotherhood of Workers, CASA), the Mexican organization that published the monthly newspaper, Sin Fronteras (Without Borders), and who worked with us in the Guild. Linda advised me to visit the women in their homes. I set out with a list, beginning with Lorena, who greeted me warmly, drew me into her kitchen, and fed me a bowl of soup, albóndigas con fideos, meatballs and noodles, urging me to eat more. She toasted tortillas on a gas range, three to a burner. She showed me photos of her son in a US Army uniform and promised to attend the next meeting and bring all her friends. I went on to the next house, where Rosa gave me nescafe with pan dulce, big rounds of sweetened bread. The kitchens were spotless, crowded with chairs and pictures of the Last Supper. Family portraits reigned in the living rooms. I was obliged to eat at every stop.

When I got back to the office, Kingsley told me he’d gotten a call from Gateway’s personnel officer. “He wants to know what’s got them riled up. I told him to come by on Friday and we’d talk about it.” I called Ramona and told her. On Friday, the women would gather in the alley next to our office, out of sight. On a sign, they would come in during our meeting with Gateway’s representative and tell him what they thought of the company.

The company man arrived on time; we seated him next to Kingsley’s desk, towards the back of our one-room office. I stepped outside and signaled, then held the door as fifty women entered, lining up against the walls, blocking the exit. Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev), Kingsley’s comrade in STO, came too. Ramona took a chair a few feet from the company man; he turned around to face her. Kingsley and I were silent; Ramona did all the talking.

She spoke for a long time. She told the whole story, from her first days at the plant, to the introduction of new machinery, to the notices sent out just before Christmas. “You must have been a worker at one time, before you got to the top. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember the little people? We made Mr. Ganz [the owner] rich.” She described the arrival of their friends, the lawyer and la nena, the little girl, as they called me. She was surrounded by her compañeras, who sometimes joined in a supporting chorus. She hammered away at her central point: “We made you what you are and you threw us away.” I was scribbling notes, as fast as I could. At some point I turned to the big wall behind my desk and saw that the women had moved aside for a young muralist to set up, sketching a panorama of South Chicago. The mural, featuring the workers, remained long after the law office became a beauty salon.

The Gateway officer listened, impassively, then offered jobs in a new plant they were opening in Michigan City, Indiana, an hour away. Noel sat down and pecked out an agreement on my typewriter. Kingsley and I thought it was a good offer and a kind of victory, but after some heated discussion, in English and Spanish, the women refused. They tore up the contract we had drawn up. Finally we moved aside and let the man leave.

It was this confrontation and not the forthcoming rally in front of the empty plant that was the high point of the campaign, when the women achieved a collective voice for their grievances.

We made up a leaflet for the final demonstration; to our delight, the Chicago Sun-Times printed a small notice in the business section, “Gateway announces third-quarter earnings up,” which we added. To raise money for the buses, we showed Salt of the Earth, about a strike of Mexican-American miners and the way their wives became central to the strike.

The day of the rally was bright and windy. I was disappointed at the turnout, enough to fill one bus but not the two I ordered. When we got to the site, I was appalled by the number of leftists who showed up, uninvited, with their newspapers, Revolution and Workers World. CASA, the Guild Labor Committee, and the North Side Workers Rights Center sent observers; Noel was there. We marched around, outside the locked gates, then climbed on an improvised platform for speeches. Ramona spoke; Noel spoke in Spanish, referring to me as “la nena” and offending my twenty-six-year-old dignity. I spoke. We went back to circling around, hungry now, chanting “Exigimos comida (We demand food),” under our breath. The day was slipping away. We got back on the bus and went back to the office, then out for tacos.

I was downcast; it was my first immersion in a proletarian battle and it was over. There was nowhere to go, the plant would not reopen—I knew that all along—and the women would not stay together except informally as neighbors. I’d seen a glimpse of a new world in the way they gathered and cohered, with their teasing and the way they made room for one another, and the way they left their families to fend for themselves—the table set, dinner in the oven. Their talk of revolution and justice. They became actors in the drama, lifted out of the daily routine. One of them resisted her husband so strenuously that the battle ended in divorce. The struggle gave them a glimpse of power, a crack in the world whose order could be overturned. They saw again the way the company exploited them, replacing them as if they were interchangeable, and they regained, too, their unity and discipline. I had never seen anything like it; it was a living demonstration of the development of the proletariat into a class for itself.

I wanted it to go on forever, but this struggle had spent itself and got lost in meanderings, in the strike support some of the women undertook at a local candle factory, in new jobs now that their unemployment checks had run out. The women who had risked disapproval excused themselves with domestic duties. I was disconsolate and felt abandoned. I was unwilling to return to meetings and marches and debates on the left, which seemed abstract and like alienated labor. I had gotten so close to the heart of the matter.