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Influences of William Z. Foster’s Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry
Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry by William Z. Foster offers a potent plan for organizing labor to confront not only their bosses, but Monopoly Capital. Written after Foster suffered a heart attack and treatment in the Soviet Union; its 28 pages are an instruction manual for the resuscitation of organized labor for the establishment of socialism.
At the time of its publication, Foster returned to politics finding the Party being lead into accommodationist partnerships with the Roosevelt administration and New Deal compromises by Earle Browder. Foster’s work positions organized labor in an assault against fascism. Organizing Methods is as boldly written and decisive as a general’s orders to an army, and given its purpose, it should be.
Foster advises cooperation between progressive and Left-wing elements in the labor movement noting that “only these elements that have the necessary vision, flexibility and courage to go forward with such an important project as the organization of the 500,000 steel workers in the face of the powerful opposition of the Steel Trust and its capitalist allies.”
Foster says “The organization movement must be industrial and national in character. That is, (a) it must include every category of workers in the steel industry, not merely a thin stratum of skilled workers at the top; and (b) the drive must be carried on energetically and simultaneously in every steel center, not simply here and there spasmodically in individual mills or steel centers.’ For workers to maneuver into a position of seizing the means of production, they need to look no further than Foster’s work.
His emphasis on creating a mass movement of the steel industry, a nationally critical industry, balances comprehensive motivation with rigorous self-criticism, optimism, and determined organizational discipline. Of this spirit, Foster says, “Hard work and sobriety are basic essentials for success. Chair-warmers and irresponsibles should be made to feel unwelcome in the organizing crew.”
Foster’s plan includes specific tactics for outreach members of racial and ethnic groups, youth and women. Foster suggests how and Amalgamated Association (A.A.) or mass
organization could be constituted using demonstration, print, and broadcast. Foster posits that this should be balanced with focused interpersonal and relational work for developing and defending the members and organization. His strategies Hallmark is its inclusivity and remarkable efficiency. Foster is thoroughly defensive of the membership and its work of uniting each of societies’ layers of preexisting strata, forming the A.A. from the matrix his plan forms within these. The Foster plan integrates his era’s primary social institutions including fraternity and church, to form the platform and to give physical space from which to mount the overall effort.
The Foster way of organizing gathers membership from the industrial base by forming flexible alliances between these, overlaid by a firm organizational structure focused on growing the union at every level, industry wide, from the rank and file. His methodology offers the most capable means for workers to achieve socialism. Foster aims to organize workers not merely as a productive force, but as an emancipatory one.
