http://themilitant.com/2016/8017/801702.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 17 May 2, 2016
(front page)
‘Workers need our own party, a labor party’
BY RUTH ROBINETT
AND ARLENE RUBINSTEIN
“We underestimate our power. The working class is strong, but most of us
don’t see it yet,” Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for
U.S. president, told members of United Steelworkers Local 10-234 at the
Monroe Energy refinery in Trainer, Pennsylvania, when she spoke at their
union meeting April 18.
She pointed to the importance of building labor solidarity with nearly
40,000 workers on strike at Verizon. “I was on their picket line, and a
few days ago joined Teamsters in a protest against the threat to cut
their pensions in half,” Kennedy said. “Joining these actions is part of
building a working-class movement that can defend us as the crisis of
the capitalist system spirals downward.”
Kennedy had a back-and-forth exchange with 15 members of the local
before their business meeting.
Monroe Energy, a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, bought the refinery in
2012. In the meeting and over pizza afterward, oil workers described the
company’s attacks on their union and working conditions — from forcing
workers to use vacation days after sick days run out to refusing to
settle grievances to forcing injured workers to get quack treatment from
the company doctor.
“Profit rates are falling, so the bosses cut wages, speed up work and
cut jobs,” Kennedy said. “Underneath the support for candidates who
aren’t from the ‘party machine,’ like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,
is the deep anger over these conditions and at the bosses and their
government. But all the capitalist candidates say the problem is caused
by ‘rip-offs’ or the greed of a handful. All of them join in covering up
the fact that the problem is the capitalist system itself.”
“Working people need to overturn the rule of the employing class, to
take the reins of government ourselves,” she said. “We need a labor
party, based on our unions, to lead a fight for power.”
Fight for health care as social right
“What is your solution to the mess of Obamacare?” refinery operator Joe
Gustitus asked the SWP candidate.
“We need to mobilize working people to fight for health care from cradle
to grave as a social right for all,” Kennedy replied. Through its labor
the working class transforms nature and produces all wealth, she said.
“But that wealth is appropriated by the capitalist class.”
She pointed to the example of workers’ social power shown in battles by
coal miners in the 1960s and ’70s for safety and protections against
black lung disease and to strengthen the United Mine Workers union. One
result of those struggles was winning health clinics in mining
communities where they had never existed before.
After the meeting, Kennedy encouraged the Steelworkers members to come
and continue the discussion at the conference the Socialist Workers
Party is organizing in Oberlin, Ohio, June 16-18.
Kennedy and other Socialist Workers Party campaigners took part in an
April 18 rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., opposing
deportation of immigrant workers. Some 2,000 people joined the action,
held as the court heard a challenge to President Barack Obama’s 2014
executive decree ordering a temporary stay on deportations of millions
of undocumented workers, while “cracking down on illegal immigration at
the border” and stepping up deportation of those deemed criminals.
Kennedy spoke with Jerry Redwine, 26, who came on a bus from Arkansas
with 50 others. “I’m from the land of Tyson Foods,” he told her, where
the poultry giant’s profits “come before things like getting a paycheck
or a bathroom break. It’s a pleasure to meet a candidate who is not
bought off.”
‘No deportations, unionize everyone’
“The Socialist Workers Party supports every fight against deportations
and victimization of immigrant workers,” Kennedy said. “This is
essential if we’re going to unionize everyone. But Obama’s executive
order, which is temporary and partial, is not a step forward for working
people.
“It’s not in the interest of the working class to have government by
presidential decree or court orders, which are arbitrary and undermine
constitutional protections against the government that our class needs,”
she added. “And we shouldn’t let ourselves be channeled into voting for
one of the capitalist candidates because of who they might appoint to
the Supreme Court.”
“I have to agree,” said Redwine. “Anything the two parties touch starts
with us compromising.” He took copies of the Socialist Workers Party
campaign literature to share with friends and discuss inviting an SWP
candidate to meet with them in Arkansas.
“What you are doing is very important,” Kennedy told Alba Morales, a
cashier who signed up for a subscription to the Militant and sold one to
a co-worker during a rally for $15 an hour and a union in Washington
April 14. “Look to yourself and your class, not the capitalist
candidates,” Kennedy said.
This point is important as union officials push workers to look to one
or another of the bourgeois candidates as a savior, however flawed.
Verizon strikers marching across the Brooklyn Bridge April 14 show the
working-class power that could be unleashed if workers had their own
party based on their unions. But union officials directed the march to
the Democratic Party primary debate that evening. The same day,
organizers of Fight for $15 actions in New York led a march to join an
anti-Trump rally, fostering the illusion that electing a Democratic
Party candidate would be an advance for working people.
Kennedy and supporters went door to door talking to workers in
coal-mining communities near Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, April 15, two
weeks after 3,000 coal miners marched to protest attempts by Alpha
Natural Resources to tear up its contract with the Mine Workers.
“My brother-in-law was laid-off from a contractor job at a Murray mine,
and told he could come back at $8 an hour,” nurse’s aide Juanita Riley
told Kennedy. “When he said no, he was denied unemployment.”
“I was a coal miner in Utah, and I know about Murray Energy Corp. Nine
people were killed by the profit drive at a Murray mine in Crandall
Canyon in 2007,” Kennedy said. “Safety issues and working conditions
were a big part of a 10-month strike I was part of at the Co-Op coal
mine. Miners there, mostly immigrants making $5 to $7 an hour, set an
example of how to reach out for solidarity. The fight for workers
control of conditions on the job to enforce safety is part of the fight
to transform the unions for the big fights that are coming.”
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party joins labor struggles, goes for ballot
Reporter’s notebook: SWP candidates on campaign trail
Spring subscription drive, April 2-May 17 (week 2) (chart)
Militant Fighting Fund, April 2-May 17 (week 2) (chart)
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