"In three days we sold four subscriptions and 25 copies of the Militant," reports Maggie Trowe, who is part of a regional sales team visiting packinghouses and college campuses in the Midwest. Trowe said the team also sold seven subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial and 26 copies of the Spanish monthly, one copy of the Marxist magazine Nueva Internacional and three pamphlets - two on women's right to choose abortion and one on the 1984-85 Hormel meatpackers strike.
"We've been to five packinghouses, including Farmland in Albert Lea, Minnesota; Swift in Worthington, Minnesota; John Morrell in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the IBP plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, and the Hormel plant in Freemont, Nebraska." Trowe, herself a meatpacker, said the sales team also went door to door in Worthington and Sioux City selling the socialist press.
Socialist workers from Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh are participating in the team over the course of the week. They are hitting campuses as well, and plan to wind up in Des Moines and Burlington, Iowa, and East Moline, Illinois, for the contract vote at Case Corp.
Wagner said the Militant team went back to the port over the weekend and met two Koreans "who invited us on board a ship and took us into the mess room. We had a discussion about the union movement in New Zealand." The team went back a third and fourth time and sold nine copies of the Militant to warehouse workers and longshoremen.
"We discussed our goals at a meeting last night and approved the following battle plan:
"Supporters of the Militant who are members of the United Steelworkers union and the United Auto Workers may need to stay later at work to meet with people on other shifts, drawing up lists of co-workers to approach. One UAW member is taking a day off to go on a regional team. We want to get a team out to the area around Buckeye farms, a giant egg production facility where there has been a union organizing drive, and a fight against the pollution and pestilence created by the presence of several million chickens.
"The plan has us hitting several campuses - Kent State, Cleveland State, Akron, Ohio State, and possibly Oberlin College.
"We also have a team going down to the MSI strike in Marietta. A striker told us over the phone that a second plant in their amalgamated local is now also on strike. We'll get the information on that, visit both picket lines, and do some door-to door-sales. A real bedrock of our sales effort is going to be fielding door-to-door teams each evening in different working-class neighborhoods."
Siem in Boston laid out their plan to make the goal:
"The main highlights are a conference on 100 years of struggle against U.S. imperialism at Roxbury Community College; the plant gate sale to longshoremen at the shipyard; the May Day rally; the Harvard book fair; and Harvard Square street fair on May 3.
"The last weekend we will do a regional team. One supporter is laid off and can join any team here or nationally. In addition to the highlights, we will also organize daily door-to-door teams in working-class communities, and sales at campuses and plant gates. We will also continue renewal calling to subscribers with the aim of getting more contributions to the Militant Fund drive and to sell New Internationals."
Siem said socialist workers in Boston sold two subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial to members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees at plant gates, and eight copies of the Militant to workers at the Bath shipyard in Maine last week. "We also sold two Militant subs at Bowdoin College during a two-day trip to Maine," she added.