Excerpt One
SN: Some woman was in the floor below, this was where they made the hotdogs. She would have to push the meat in and whatever and stuff, and she pushed something and the machine was going, the chopper, and it took her fingers tips off, you know. This friend of ours she said something, well how could they do this, they should have safety guards, you know, because we talked about safety also. Well the people after this accident and they were horrified but they figured they couldn't do anything. Well that night a bunch of us got together and we wrote out a leaflet on this and came out with certain demands. And asked the women not to operate those machines until the company assured us that there would be safeguards. The whole plant heard about it. Here's this bunch of women actually organized and stuck together, you know, and they went right up to the foreman and swore and said, you know, in Polish, whatever, English, you know "We don't work, you fix the machines, put safety guards on, you know, something . . .

S.N. I was getting together with these other people, young folk. By the way they were all young. And saying, well here the CIO was taking, they're organizing, and the sit-down in Flint. The steel workers are organizing, automobile workers are organizing. We want to organize too.

Q. At this time did you see yourself as a radical or a . . .

S.N. Oh sure, sure, because I wasn't about to do housework or anything else, because now I was convinced I became a dedicated radical. You know, working with these friends whom I liked and respected very much. It made a lot of sense, you know.

Q. Do you think very many of the people who were involved then in organizing the early CIO were also socialists?

S.N. Most of them were, I think. Most were dedicated or had sympathies in that direction.

Q. What would a socialist society mean to working people?

S.N. Well basically, a socialist society would mean that the means of production would be owned by them and that the fruits of their labor would be divided on a more equitable basis than it was.

Excerpt Two
S.N. We started talking union. The thing that precipitated it is that on the floor below they used to make hotdogs and one of the women, in putting the meat into the chopper, got her fingers caught. There were no safety guards. Her fingers got into the hotdogs and they were chopped off. It was horrible.

Three of us "colonizers" had a meeting during our break and decided this was the time to have a stoppage and we did. (Colonizers were people sent by the YCL [Young communist League] or CP [Communist Party] into points of industrial concentration that the CP had designated. These included mass basic industries: steel, mining, packing, and railroad. The colonizers were like red missionaries. They were expected to do everything possible to keep jobs and organize for many years.) All six floors went on strike. We said, "Sit, stop." And we had a sit-down. We just stopped working right inside the building, protesting the speed and the unsafe conditions. We thought that people's fingers shouldn't go into the machine, that it was an outrage. The women got interested in the union. . .

I remember one of the first big CP meetings when we had William Foster come to talk. The hall wasn't big enough. Somebody had gotten hold of a loudspeaker (they were very difficult to get in those days) and we hooked that up so that people could hear down the steps and into the street.

We had a YCL/CP unit. (There weren't enough people in either the YCL or the CP to meet separately and so we met together, younger and older people.) We would have meetings and marches and classes on Marxism and Leninism. We would write articles on the history of Marxism and Leninism which we would then discuss. These would go into The Yards' Worker. We asked the old time friends of Bill Foster from the different plants for news of what was going on.