Similar petitioning drives will follow in Pittsburgh, Seattle, and New York City.

“We will start with a week-long effort on Memorial Day weekend,” said Tony Lancaster, a laid-off coal miner who is helping organize the campaign to gain ballot status for Brian Taylor, SWP candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh. Campaign supporters will then take a break to attend the June 9-11 party convention in Ohio. They will resume petitioning in mid-June and plan to collect about 2,000 signatures—double the requirement—to place Taylor, a coal miner and member of the United Mine Workers of America, on the ballot by the end of the month.

Supporters of Taylor’s campaign and of other Socialist Workers candidates have already begun reaching out with the party’s platform. On April 9, campaigners from Pittsburgh and nearby cities visited mine portals and coal mining communities in northern Appalachia, Lancaster said, where they introduced working people to the Militant and the Marxist magazine New International.

“We announced Taylor’s election campaign and found interest,” Lancaster said. Thirty miners bought the Militant at six mine portals and one subscribed to the socialist paper at the mine where Taylor works.

Ron Smith, another Socialist Workers campaign supporter from Pittsburgh, said he explained to coal miners and other workers he met that the campaign is putting forward the need of workers to use union power to defend job safety, wages, and working conditions. In response, he added, one miner said: “That’s right. They are trying to open up mines nonunion out here. That’s not right.” This miner said the bosses were planning to reopen nonunion a formerly union mine he had worked at in Cadiz, Ohio.

During the last two weeks of June, campaigners for Chris Hoeppner, SWP candidate for mayor of Seattle, plan to collect about 3,000 signatures—double the requirement—to put his name on the ballot.

That effort will be followed by a more ambitious petitioning campaign in New York, which will start July 12 and conclude at the beginning of August. The Socialist Workers Party, which nominated Martín Koppel as its candidate for New York City mayor on April 4, named other candidates for its citywide slate a week later. These are Arrin Hawkins for Manhattan borough president, Peter Musser for Bronx borough president, and Dan Fein for city comptroller. Campaigners project collecting more than 15,000 signatures—well above the required 7,500—for this ballot effort.

Socialist Workers campaign supporters in New York have been distributing hundreds of copies of a statement by Koppel on the need to fight police brutalization of working people (see page 10). Many workers were glad to see such a response.

“Good, this is one of us running,” an equipment repair worker in Manhattan’s Garment District told Koppel after reading the statement. The worker said he has plenty of experience with cops routinely harassing young workers in his neighborhood in the Bronx, and he himself was arbitrarily arrested once in what the police later shrugged off as a case of “mistaken identity.”

Koppel and two campaign supporters took part in an April 8 mid-Manhattan rally by hospital and nursing home workers organized by Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union. More than 1,000 workers mobilized to oppose cuts in hospital funding by the New York state government.

“Our campaign got a lot of interest among these workers,” Koppel said. “We pointed out that the employers have been driving down wages and working conditions factory by factory and industry by industry. But that’s not enough to turn around the bosses’ declining profit rates and radically shift the relationship of forces between capital and labor. That’s why the ruling class and both of its main parties—the Democrats and Republicans—are going after Social Security and other programs that are not only a social extension of our wages but boost class solidarity.”

The SWP platform points above all to workers’ need to organize unions and mobilize union power to defend themselves from this unrelenting antilabor offensive, Koppel said.

Working people need to organize independently of the employers’ class, not only on the economic level but in the political arena too, he added. “When workers go on strike they often go up against not only the company but the cops, the courts, the government, and all its agencies. That helps underscore why we need a labor party, based on a fighting union movement, that defends the interests of workers and farmers 365 days a year,” Koppel said in an exchange with some hospital workers who asked what his campaign stood for.

“We wouldn’t let the boss into our union. Likewise, we can’t let the bosses’ parties speak for working people,” Koppel said.

“Our campaign presents demands that help unify working people in struggle, such as a massive public works program to rebuild schools and hospitals, repair the subways, build affordable housing, and other pressing projects that meet human needs and can create jobs for tens of thousands,” the socialist candidate continued. “These demands are part of a strategy that instills the need for workers and farmers to organize a struggle to take power out of the hands of the capitalist class.”

While soapboxing April 10 in Inwood, a working-class neighborhood in upper Manhattan, Koppel told youth and workers who stopped by: “We’re always told to think like ‘Americans.’ But there isn’t one America—there are two Americas. That of the tiny handful of superrich families who rule this country, and that of working people. These classes have irreconcilable interests.”

The Socialist Workers campaign begins with the world, Koppel said. Workers and farmers in the United States have common interests with working people and the oppressed around the globe. “We oppose the campaign by the U.S. rulers, under the banner of opposing nuclear proliferation, to prevent semicolonial countries from developing the sources of energy they need for economic development, including through nuclear power,” Koppel said.

“Our campaign also calls for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of central Asia, Colombia, Korea, the Balkans, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

Other SWP candidates announced in early April include James Harris for mayor of Atlanta; Margaret Trowe for mayor and Laura Garza for city council in Boston; Romina Green for mayor of Cleveland; Ilona Gersh for mayor of Detroit; and Jacob Perasso for mayor and Rebecca Williamson for city council in St. Paul, Minnesota. On April 11, a Socialist Workers conference in Miami named Omari Musa as the party’s candidate for mayor of that city.

To join Socialist Workers candidates in campaigning activities or to volunteer to help get them on the ballot, contact the campaign center nearest you (see directory).
 
 
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