Anti-labor outfit targets union at Momentive

An anti-labor outfit posing as a socialist current in the working-class movement is trying to convince IUE-CWA workers who waged a 105-day strike against Momentive Performance Materials to quit their union and divide and weaken their ongoing fight against the bosses.

The Michigan-based Socialist Equality Party, which runs the World Socialist Website, has a long history of anti-labor disruption aimed at workers engaged in often bitter struggles and at revolutionary working-class organizations like the Socialist Workers Party.

In a recent article posted on their website, Philip Guelpa writes that “to take this fight forward Momentive workers must break from the straitjacket imposed on them by the union and form independent strike committees.” If followed, this course would set back the labor movement.

The anti-union group doesn’t build solidarity, it sows division, calling for strikers to abandon their unions. They argue all U.S. labor organizations are in a conspiratorial alliance with the employers. As hard-fought battles drag on, they seek to get the ear of workers who get frustrated or discouraged, especially when they’re faced with obstacles union officials place in front of fighting as effectively as possible.

But the road around those obstacles is not to split the union, but to make our union stronger as our fights with the employing class grow, to transform our unions into class-struggle fighting machines.

The outfit has intervened against the unions in recent years in battles of workers at Cooper Tire in Findlay, Ohio; Caterpillar in Joliet, Illinois; Con Edison in New York; American Crystal Sugar in North Dakota and Minnesota; and elsewhere.

— JACOB PERASSO