The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-08-19
Conditions of the Metal Workers
and Our Organizational Tasks

and sentenced to years for trying to or
ganize the workers. In the Jessup Steel in
Washington, Pa, group of workers are being
organized into shop group In Farrell about
600 steel workers, white and Negro, partici-
pated in a picnic held under the auspices of
the Metal Workers League.
Organizational Weaknesses.
1t is, however, of greatest Importance to
learn from some of our past mistakes in or
ganization so that we will be able to stop the
gap between our influence and the fact that
we have not been able to grow simultaneously
organizationay In spite of the fact that we
must not forget, that the achievement of the
League in starting out after the Cleveland
Convention with nothing and today we have
almost 1000 members, we must nevertheless
record serious mistakes in the building of the
League.
The major mistake was that we started out
building general Leagues composed of metal
workers in given city and not concentrating
on shop work. The present policy is to build
our Leagues mainly shop basis. These
shop groups Immediately are split into depart
ment committees and instead of too large
meetings of % to so workers in large shops,
we have for instance 1912 workers in each
department and the coordination of the work
be done through the representatives from the
various departments
Thus we shall be able to get in contact with
all the workers in the various sections of the
shop and when struggle breaks out we can
Immediately in an organized way broaden the
struggle to involve the entire plant. This
policy will also to a great extent protect the
workers who join the revolutionary unions
against company spies and make it possible to
more effectively carry out our work from the
inside.
Big Task.
One of the great tasks facing US today is
to link up our general agitation with our or
ganizational tasks. 1t is not sufficient that
we speak to the workers only in mass meet
ings AMI demonstrations but that we learn how
to be able to not only enthuse the workers
with our general speeches but that we will
take advantage of this enthusiasm by bring
ing the workers into the organization and then
be able to keep them.
Day to Day Work Imperative.
There is a dangerous tendency in the revo-
lutionary unions and the Party to live on the
spectacular and not to bother about the every
day Jimmy Higgins work of visiting the work.
ers in the homes, signing up individual men,
bers for the unions, etc. | would like to use
New York as an example, where for instance
demonstrations are great but where the Metal
Workers League, in spite of the great posi-
er than one good shop group of 10 in spite of
having IT'S members on the books.
We must learn not to be too big to spend
hours with workers individually, Systematically
concentrating on certain shops until we have
gotten some results instead of jumping from
one place to another. In all strikes we have
participated in the main weakness has been
the same-no contact-and we must as quickly
as possible get the members Of the unions and
the members of the Party and the Y. C. L.
to benefit from this experience. The "face
towards the shops" must be living slogan
to all revolutionary workers.
The workers in the metal industry are beg
gng for leadership of their struggles and we
must take this responsibility seriously by cor
recting all our mistakes and begin as speedily
as possible to make all the major steel mills,
automobile factories and metal manufacturing
plants fortresses of revolutionary unionism.