https://themilitant.com/2020/01/25/swp-back-workers-fight-to-win-control-over-job-safety/
SWP: Back workers’ fight to win control over job safety
article
BY SETH GALINSKY
Vol. 84/No. 4
February 3, 2020
MILITANT/ILONA GERSH Naomi Craine, right, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate
in Illinois, speaks at Jan. 10 rally in Chicago to demand freedom for
Gerald Reed
and other victims of cop torture. “It’s an outrage that Reed is still in
jail a year after his conviction was overturned,” Craine told fellow
protesters.
figure
Naomi Craine, right, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois, speaks
at Jan. 10 rally in Chicago to demand freedom for Gerald Reed and other
victims
of cop torture. “It’s an outrage that Reed is still in jail a year after
his conviction was overturned,” Craine told fellow protesters.
MILITANT/ILONA GERSH Naomi Craine, right, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate
in Illinois, speaks at Jan. 10 rally in Chicago to demand freedom for
Gerald Reed
and other victims of cop torture. “It’s an outrage that Reed is still in
jail a year after his conviction was overturned,” Craine told fellow
protesters.
figure end
The Socialist Workers Party 2020 presidential ticket will be announced
shortly and a slate of candidates across the country is advancing a
program for
working people to defend their jobs, income and safety and fight in the
interests of all the oppressed. They are campaigning on workers’
doorsteps in cities,
towns and rural areas, on workers’ picket lines, at protest actions and
other political events presenting a program to unite working people to
fight attempts
by the bosses to make us pay for the crisis of their capitalist system.
By advancing working-class struggle, the party’s platform explains
workers can take steps to build class consciousness and see the need to
replace the
rule of the capitalist class with a workers and farmers government. And
the party’s candidates explain what can be done to advance that way
forward today.
They point to the need for workers control of conditions on the job and
for a labor party, based on the unions, to lead a political fight to
defend workers’
wages and living conditions.
“We’re getting a real hearing,” Maggie Trowe, Socialist Workers Party
candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky, told the Militant by phone Jan.
21. Trowe,
who works at Walmart, noted that campaign supporters in Kentucky have
been getting back to people they met over the last year. During the
strike at General
Motors, campaign supporters met a Ford worker who had joined a
solidarity caravan. “We ran into her again when we were campaigning for
the SWP ticket on
workers’ doorsteps,” Trowe said. “Last week she came to a Militant Labor
Forum in Louisville.”
SWP member Ellen Brickley spoke at the forum, explaining the campaign
platform’s call for a “fight for workers control over production and
safety in the
factories, mines, railroads and all energy monopolies to protect those
on the job and in nearby communities.”
No worker should die on the job
Some 5,250 workers died on the job in the U.S. in 2018 — the latest year
figures are available — because of the capitalists’ drive for profits
and their
disregard for the life and limb of workers.
“No worker should die on the job because of capitalist greed,” Brickley
said. Socialist Workers Party campaigners across the country explain
that workers
and their unions must have the right to stop production if conditions
are not safe
“The Ford worker told us she loved the forum,” Trowe reported.
In Texas, the SWP is running Gerardo Sánchez, a worker at Walmart, for
U.S. Senate. “We’ve been explaining working people need to build our own
party,”
he said. “A lot of people respond positively to that. But especially in
the big cities like Dallas some who are bombarded by the liberals’ media
argue
we need to get rid of Donald Trump first.
“We explain the anti-Trump hysteria is no road forward. The rule of the
capitalist class and the lesser-evil politics of their two main parties
is the
problem we face,” Sánchez said.
“We explain that the impeachment of Trump is really aimed at the working
class. If they can violate the president’s constitutional rights, they
can do
it to you, too.”
Rail worker Henry Dennison is the SWP candidate for governor of
Washington state. Dennison and a campaign supporter went door to door in
Mountlake Terrace,
a working-class town north of Seattle, in early January around the time
a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem
Soleimani in
a combat operation in Iraq.
“Most of the people we talked to were opposed to the U.S. intervention
there,” Dennison said. “We sold a Militant subscription to a guy from
Libya. Our
party calls for U.S. troops to get entirely out of the Mideast. I asked
him if anything that Washington has done in Libya had made life better
there. He
laughed and said ‘no.’”
The Militant also reports on the struggles waged by working people in
Iran against the government, as well as protests for political rights in
Iraq and
Lebanon that workers have a stake in.
We need a political party that will point a road forward for the entire
working class, Dennison said, that explains the class side of every
question, from
U.S. war moves abroad to the fight for Black rights and for women’s
right to contraception and to choose abortion.
Dennison walked the picket lines of striking copper workers at Asarco
mine complexes in Arizona and is building solidarity with them.
‘Free Gerald Reed’
The communist candidates and the party’s platform take up other
questions of importance to the working classes.
Naomi Craine, a railroad worker and the party’s candidate for U.S.
Senate in Illinois, joined in and spoke at a Jan. 10 rally in Chicago to
demand freedom
for Gerald Reed and all other victims of torture at the hands of the
Chicago police. Reed’s conviction was overturned in December 2018 but he
is still
in jail, as prosecutors are pushing for a new trial.
“It’s an outrage that Reed is in jail a year after his conviction was
vacated,” Craine told the protesters. “This is part of what is an
injustice system
that comes down against working people, disproportionately against those
who are Black or Latino.”
Craine and other SWP candidates encourage people they meet to read
“It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The
Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class
along with other books by party leaders. SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters
in her introduction notes that prisons are a “grotesquely magnified
reproduction
of the social relations, values, and ‘business practices’ of the
dog-eat-dog capitalist world.”
Between now and November SWP candidates are urging other workers to join
them in action against the many injustices that capitalism breeds and
are presenting
a course of working-class struggle to overturn capitalist rule.
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