Some 30 campaign supporters had fanned out across Seattle that day and the preceding week, campaigning with the party platform and collecting signatures to gain ballot status for the socialist candidate.
Also speaking was Steve Clark, a member of the SWP National Committee. Organizing unions and using union power, he said, is essential if working people are to resist the employers’ drive to cut wages, extend hours, throw safety to the winds, and cut pensions and health coverage. Washington’s brutal war in Iraq and others it is preparing are an extension of the bosses’ offensive to drive down living standards and job conditions at home.
Clark said SWP candidates for mayor in Seattle, New York City, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere are speaking out against the U.S. government’s drive to prevent nations oppressed by imperialism from developing nuclear power and other energy sources to expand electrification necessary for economic and social advances. They are explaining the need to build a revolutionary movement that will lead the working class and other oppressed and exploited producers to take power from the capitalist class and establish a workers and farmers government.
Hoeppner, a packinghouse worker who has been a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, said the campaign builds on the activity the SWP carries out year round. Party members active in unions have helped mobilize union solidarity in the Northwest for the fight of Utah coal miners organizing to join the United Mine Workers of America, and Snokist cannery workers in the Yakima Valley who recently won a seven-month strike for a union contract. The SWP campaign champions the effort by cement haulers at the Port of Seattle to join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
The following week, Hoeppner said, he would be speaking at an event organized by young people in the area to raise funds to participate in the August 7-15 World Festival of Youth and Students in Caracas, Venezuela.
Campaign volunteers reported a good response to petitioning at the longshore union hall. A docker who participated in one of two delegations to Utah to bring solidarity to the miners there helped collect signatures, and two others bought copies of the Marxist magazine New International and a subscription to the campaign newspaper, the Militant.
More than $8,000 was contributed or pledged at the forum for the campaign and to cover legal and other expenses of the effort to win an exemption from disclosing the names of campaign donors(see box below).
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