A weeklong national sales effort in the Western coalfields wrapped up on the final weekend of the campaign. David Flanagan from Price, Utah, sent a note on the results.

“We sold a total of 34 Militant subscriptions during the weeklong effort,” Flanagan reported. “Ten of those were to coal miners; of those, eight are miners involved in the union-organizing effort at the Co-Op mine in Huntington.

“We were joined by Militant supporters from Cleveland, Los Angeles, Colorado, and Salt Lake City,” he continued. “We were able to send people to sell outside the entrance to seven of the 10 mines in the area during the shift changes. Most of the subscriptions we sold were during door-to-door campaigning in the mining towns around here. In two small former company towns of East Carbon and Sunnyside, we sold 10 subscriptions.”

“The team was great,” said Mike Slavik, 20, who participated in the western coal team. Slavik works in a sandblasting shop in Cleveland and joined the Young Socialists after returning home from the trip. “It was a lot different from doing tables on the street here in Cleveland,” he said.

“Almost everyone we met going door-to-door in the area knew about the Co-Op miners’ fight for the union,” Slavik noted. “Most said they were for the union getting in at Co-Op. This was true of the coal haulers, too.”

Julian Santana, 24, a meat packer who is currently laid off in Los Angeles, also commented on how many pro-union workers he met on the team. “During a visit to Orangeville, Utah, we met a coal hauler who says they haven’t had a raise in 15 years,” he said. Santana said he participated in seven sales at mine portals in the area. “I saw a lot of interest in organizing unions at the mines and among the coal haulers.”

“The third day I was there I met Pat Dirks, a miner who was nearly killed in an accident,” Slavik said. “At the end of this month, the company is cutting insurance to his family. The two miners that went to rescue him got cited by MSHA [Mine Safety and Health Administration], while the company got off.”

Dirks was working at the Dugout Mine, near Price, last November when he suffered serious injuries when the roof of the mine collapsed on him.

Slavik says the experience meeting miners, coal haulers, and others involved in the discussions and struggles on unionizing the mines has got him thinking about getting involved in the struggle. “Hopefully in the next couple years, I might go down that way and get a job in the mines,” he said.

A Militant sales team from Los Angeles visited an area of the nearby city of Compton May 15, which was recently the scene of reckless police violence. While chasing an unarmed driver, several deputies fired over 120 rounds of ammunition in a residential working-class neighborhood, injuring the driver and leaving bullet holes in four different houses.

“The bullet missed my husband’s head by two inches,” said a woman who lives in an upstairs apartment near the scene. “He was covered in glass from the broken window.”

“They didn’t have to shoot so many times,” said a man who decided to subscribe to Perspectiva Mundial. Another new PM subscriber pointed to a window in her house that had been shattered by police bullets.

“I always say ‘you’re the same thing I am when you take off that uniform,’” said Shara Wilson, 28, as she signed up for a subscription to the Militant. She described how the cops are constantly harassing people in the neighborhood.

Her fiancé, Germaine Catching, 25, a trucker, said that newscasts he had seen about the incident began with the line “tonight, in a troubled neighborhood in Compton….”

“Well, there wasn’t any trouble until they brought it here,” he commented.

Concurrent with the subscription effort, socialists around the world have been campaigning to sell the two newest issues of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory. That campaign will continue through August 15, the end of the World Festival of Youth and Students taking place in Caracas, Venezuela.

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Click here to see the New International sales campaign scoreboard
See link for New International sales offer.