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A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people
Vol. 64/No. 37October 2, 2000


'Trowe isn't your typical candidate'
 
The following article appeared in the September 14 issue of the Austin Daily Herald, one of the two daily newspapers in Austin, Minnesota, under the headline "Former QPP worker running as vice president."
 
BY JANA PETERSON 
Margaret Trowe isn't your typical candidate for vice president of the United States. For one, she's not a career politician although she has been active in the politics of protest since she was a teen-ager in the 1960s.

She is by trade a butcher. She worked the offal line at Quality Pork Processors in Austin for a year, before leaving to hit the campaign trail. Before QPP, she worked at the Swift Plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, for two years.

Nor is she financed by soft money. All $100,000 that she and the Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate and garment worker James Harris have for their six-month campaign came from $10 and $20 donations from regular people, not corporations. To make the money last, the two are sleeping on couches and driving -rather than flying - almost everywhere they go.

Plus she likes hip-hop.

"There's a lot of rebellion, a lot of anger in hip-hop," she said. "A lot of young people who couldn't look themselves in the mirror if they joined the system. They see racism, war - they can't happily join in the stock market."

Trowe (rhymes with plow) was in Austin on Wednesday to touch base with some friends and former co-workers at QPP, before she headed to Nebraska early today. She attended a fund-raising dinner here, where she said the cost was to be "more like $5 a plate."

The ultimate goal for Trowe and Harris isn't to sit at the head of the greatest capitalist nation - it's to topple capitalism and create a society run by the workers and the farmers, not the bureaucrats, the technocrats and the rich.

"I decided when I was young and active in protests about Vietnam, for women's rights, against racism, that the capitalist system was the problem," Trowe said. "You can't fix it - greed is an essential component of capitalism. What we need - and what we're starting to see - is a movement, with the unions at its core, of workers starting to defend themselves against exploitation."

Austin, she said, is a town with a tradition of fighting for workers rights, way back to the 1930s. She credits the Hormel strike in the 1980s - even though the company won in the end - with leading the way.

"Workers almost across the board were accepting deep concessions without a fight," Trowe said. "The P-9 said, 'we'll fight' ... Even though they didn't win, that strike was the beginning of the end of the retreat in the '80s. The Hormel workers threw down the gauntlet and said 'the buck stops here.'"

She applauded the nurses at St. Mark's Lutheran Home and Austin Medical Center for organizing unions and she said they are part of an international trend among workers: meat packers, hotel workers, farmers, plant workers all over, but especially in the United States are protesting working conditions and inferior wages.

"We're seeing a growing resistance - it can't help but grow," Trowe said. "The capitalist boom that we're experiencing has been financed by all these things: the speeding up of lines in the plants, the cuts in real wages in terms of buying power, the low commodity prices for farmers ..."

She rattles off a list of recent strikes and sit-downs: Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, the Holiday Inn Express, Firestone/Bridgestone, dairy farmers dumping milk over the Labor Day holiday.

"There's a pretty feisty mood out there," she said.

So far in her campaign, she has been in 31 cities and towns in 17 states. Trowe isn't done yet - there's eight weeks to go until the general election and she'll stay on the campaign trail as long as possible.

And, while she conceded that victory in the campaign is unlikely - the pair are on the ballot in 14 states including Minnesota and the District of Columbia - the revolutionary with the silver hair and glasses said she already feels like they've won.

"We've gotten out at an energetic pace," she said. "I feel like we've really contributed to the socialist movement."

After the election, Trowe said she'll go back to work, probably at another meat-packing plant, and continue spreading the word about the Socialist Workers Party. Next time she's in Austin she promised more advance notice and a public appearance - probably before the General Election.

Anyone interested in knowing more about the Socialist Workers Party or the Harris-Trowe campaign can go to http://www.themilitant.com and click on Socialist Workers Campaign. The Militant is the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party.

 
 
 
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