‘Trump-Biden debate shows workers need our own party’
https://themilitant.com/2020/10/10/trump-biden-debate-shows-workers-need-our-own-party/
BY SUSAN LAMONT
Vol. 84/No. 41
October 19, 2020
Congress keeps “arguing about the stimulus package and doesn’t act
because they don’t go home to children who are hungry,” LaTia
Killingsworth, right, told SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy in
Forest Park, Georgia, Oct. 1. Kennedy explained workers need to organize
to fight to defend jobs, wages and job safety. Killingsworth endorsed
the SWP campaign
MILITANT/RACHELE FRUIT
Congress keeps “arguing about the stimulus package and doesn’t act
because they don’t go home to children who are hungry,” LaTia
Killingsworth, right, told SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy in
Forest Park, Georgia, Oct. 1. Kennedy explained workers need to organize
to fight to defend jobs, wages and job safety. Killingsworth endorsed
the SWP campaign.
MADISON, Tenn. — “We watched the Trump-Biden presidential debate,”
Allison Kultaeva told Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate
Alyson Kennedy, as she was campaigning in this Nashville suburb Oct. 3.
“It was terrible! I’m so happy to find out there’s a different choice.”
Like many others the SWP candidates are meeting in the final weeks of
the 2020 campaign, she is repelled by candidates of the bosses’ parties
and interested in learning more about the SWP, a working-class party
that starts from the capacities of working people to organize together
and fight to change the worsening conditions we face.
Kultaeva, a former truck driver, liked Kennedy’s call for workers to
form their own party, a labor party. “That would be kind of like a union
for everybody,” she said. “That’s what workers need.”
A labor party will grow out of the battles we fight on the job, Kennedy
said. It will be built through the unions fighting for a federal
government-financed public workers program to put millions to work at
union-scale wages, to create jobs building schools, hospitals and other
things workers need.
“The only way to get there is to stand together on the job and begin to
fight for higher wages and better working conditions, like the
farmworkers in Washington state who I recently visited,” the SWP
candidate said. These workers at a half-dozen packinghouses in the
Yakima Valley struck for safer working conditions in May and June,
gained some improvements, and now are fighting to win union recognition.
“Workers are not pushovers even when we don’t have a union yet,”
Kennedy, who works as a cashier at a Walmart in Dallas, said. “At many
Walmart stores, workers have fought against speedup and for safety on
the job. These experiences give us confidence that we can rebuild the
union movement around the country.”
On Oct. 4 Kennedy and campaign supporters John Benson and Lisa Potash
campaigned at a truck stop in southeast Atlanta. They met Ashley Lawton
and her husband Randy, an owner-operator from Lexington, South Carolina.
“I have to bid lower to get a load, to keep busy with work,” Randy
Lawton said. “My combined truck mortgage and insurance is $1,200 a week.
The dispatcher owns you!”
“We have to pay everything ourselves — gas, repairs, maintenance,” he
said. “I only made $30,000 in 2019, out of $188,000 gross! The problem
is, there’s no unity among drivers.”
“And the cost of living keeps going up and up,” added Ashley Lawton.
That’s why every contract should have a cost-of-living clause that
raises wages whenever prices go up, SWP candidates say. Kennedy told the
Lawtons that she and Jarrett went to trucker protests in Washington,
D.C., earlier this year. “It’s through these kinds of actions that
working people can unite and begin to change things,” Kennedy said.
“The problem is the divisions in the country, between Democrats and
Republicans, between Black and white,” Ashley Lawton said.
There are two main classes, Kennedy said: the capitalist class and the
working class. The bosses have their twin parties, the Democrats and
Republicans, to defend them, she pointed out, and working people need
our own party.
“As working people begin to organize and fight together to change our
situation, we will build solidarity and unity that can overcome the
divisions the bosses use to keep their system of exploitation and
oppression going,” Kennedy said. “By acting together, we’ll gain
confidence in ourselves and each other.”
Tremendous advances for working people were registered through conquests
won during the fight for Black rights in the 1960s and 1970s, Kennedy
noted. “In many ways working people are more united than ever before. We
saw that so clearly in the protests earlier this summer against police
brutality, which drew people of all backgrounds into the streets in big
cities and small towns.”
But those protests “have been cut short,” Kennedy said, “by antifa,
Black Lives Matter and other forces that carried out looting, trashing
and other anti-working-class acts that drive people away.”
Lisa Potash contributed to this article.
SWP candidate joins rail worker, trucker actions
by Arlene Rubinstein
WASHINGTON — Socialist Workers Party vice presidential candidate Malcolm
Jarrett brought solidarity to Amtrak workers protesting job cuts in an
action at the U.S. Capitol, and joined with independent truckers calling
attention to attacks on their livelihood, during his Sept. 30-Oct. 4
campaign tour here.
Trucker Artie Daniels signs up for Militant subscription from Socialist
Workers Party vice presidential candidate Malcolm Jarrett at Oct. 3
truckers’ cookout in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
MILITANT/ARLENE RUBINSTEIN
Trucker Artie Daniels signs up for Militant subscription from Socialist
Workers Party vice presidential candidate Malcolm Jarrett at Oct. 3
truckers’ cookout in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
“The cuts at Amtrak not only mean people lose their jobs, but the
workplace stops being different generations,” David McClain, a train
engineer on the Virginia Railway Express commuter railroad and member of
SMART-TD Local 1933, told Jarrett at the Sept. 30 Amtrak protest of 75.
“The bosses are responsible for the layoffs,” Jarrett said. “That’s why
the unions have to lead a fight for jobs. The workweek should be cut
with no cut in pay, to defend jobs. The full cost of ensuring jobs
should come from their profits, not on the backs of workers and our
families.”
McClain signed to endorse the Socialist Workers Party 2020 ticket.
When Jarrett and campaign supporters went to the fairgrounds in
Fredericksburg, Virginia, Oct. 3, owner-operator truckers were preparing
a cookout. The previous day they had parked their 30 rigs on the
National Mall in Washington in a “Ten Four DC” action. When truckers say
“10-4” — radio shorthand for OK — it’s a way of saying “I’ve got your back.”
“If you got rid of the ELD [electronic logging device] independent
truckers would convoy you to the White House,” Jerry Campbell, from
Union, West Virginia, with 32 years truck driving, told Jarrett. The
devices track drivers’ movements, to aid federal agencies in imposing
regulations on the number of hours drivers can operate their vehicles.
The devices add to hated bureaucratic red tape that blocks
owner-operators from making their own decisions about how to work safely.
This comes on top of the disastrous impact on truckers’ livelihoods as
brokers use heightened competition among truckers for work to cut the
rates they pay drivers. This has accelerated during government lockdowns.
Many drivers also face rising indebtedness as a consequence of the way
the big trucking companies force owner-operators to cover all their
expenses.
“Three of my friends just had to get rid of their rigs,” Campbell said.
“The independent operators are like the small farmers. We have very
little control, and we take all the risks,” trucker Artie Daniels from
McKenney, Virginia, told Jarrett. “If we don’t stand up, they will roll
over us.”
Daniels described joining thousands of farmers demanding parity prices
for their crops at least equal to costs of production, at a 1979
tractorcade in Washington.
“I voted for Ross Perot. I voted for Obama twice. I voted for Trump.
Don’t get me started on the Clintons. Now what?” Daniels said.
Unlike the capitalist candidates, who all promise to “solve” problems
working people face, the SWP presents demands working people can fight
for together that advance our own interests. And they present a course
of action to overcome divisions the bosses foster, Jarrett said.
“The Socialist Workers Party is a voice for workers and all those
exploited and oppressed by capital,” Jarrett said. “We call for building
a labor party. Together we can chart a course to take political power
out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and establish a workers and
farmers government.”
For federal public works program to provide jobs
“You’re in good hands at Allstate,” the familiar TV commercial says. But
the bosses of this large insurance company announced this week they are
eliminating 3,800 workers. Allstate is one of a number of big capitalist
outfits slashing its workforce…
For a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to stop job cuts!
This statement was issued by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party
candidate for president, Oct. 7. In the hands of the Democrats and
Republicans, the two parties of ruling capitalist families, billions of
dollars in government handouts have flowed into the…
Socialist Workers Party new updated 2020 campaign platform
WORKERS NEED A UNION MOVEMENT IN EVERY WORKPLACE. The Socialist Workers
Party presents a fighting working-class program to build and use our
unions to defend the interests of all working people. We need to fight
growing employer attacks on our…
Endorse the 2020 Socialist Workers Party campaign!
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On the Picket Line
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25, 50 and 75 years ago
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_____
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm
of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat
of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii