Campaign supporters petitioned May 14 at grocery stores in the Dorchester, South Boston, and East Boston workers districts and at the “Wake Up the Earth” community festival in Jamaica Plain. The next day, Trowe and two supporters joined the Haitian-American Unity parade in the Mattapan district.

A contingent of workers from the electric and gas utility NStar, members of Utility Workers Union of America Local 369 whose contract expired May 16, took part in the community festival. Trowe told the workers her campaign backed their efforts to win higher levels of staffing necessary to provide safe electrical service to the community. The workers have also rejected cuts in retiree health benefits, forced overtime, and a two-tier proposal that would reduce pension benefits for new hires. Two days later, the utility workers went on strike.

The Socialist Workers campaign “supports workers struggles to organize unions and strengthen those we have to fight the bosses’ offensive, like that against your union,” Trowe said. The SWP candidates offer a working-class alternative to the parties of the employing class—the Democrats and Republicans—and other capitalist parties, she added. Socialist candidates point to the need for working people to organize independently of the bosses not only on the economic front but on the political arena too, to build a labor party based on the unions that fights in the interests of workers and farmers.

Dave Sharaffa, one of the utility workers, thanked Trowe for her support and signed the petition.

“I just want to hug you guys because you support a woman’s right to choose abortion,” a young woman told Trowe, and grabbed her petition to sign.

SWP campaign supporters from the area were aided by three volunteers from out of town—one from New York and two from New Jersey, where socialists completed a ballot drive the previous weekend.

A poster of the “Earth at Night,” which appears on the back cover of the Marxist magazine New International no. 13, attracted a lot of attention when SWP campaigners spoke about it. The map graphically depicts the gap in economic development between the small number of imperialist nations—concentrated in North America, Europe, and Japan—and the majority of humanity living in the semicolonial world, as well as class differentiations within each country. Most of the colonial world is in the dark at night because of lack of electrification. “We found interest when we explained that the SWP fights for exposing the drive by Washington and its allies—under the cover of ‘nuclear nonproliferation,’ including threats against Iran and north Korea—to prevent the nations oppressed by imperialism from developing nuclear power and other sources of energy they need for economic and social advances,” said Trowe.

Garza also ran into several unionists in the course of campaigning. One, a retired government worker and member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told her, “I don’t agree with your socialist ideas, but I do agree with you on Social Security and unions.”

Garza had explained that the socialist campaign calls for no cuts in current or future Social Security benefits, Medicare programs, or workers compensation, and for extending Social Security to cover lifetime, government-guaranteed, universal health care for everyone in this country.

Another unionist who works at U.S. Airways signed Garza’s petition after she expressed solidarity with workers who were protesting pension cuts by United. “When the company hired non-union contractors to clean the planes,” he said, “I went and handed out union cards to them.”

At the Haitian parade, Trowe told marchers, “Our campaign calls for U.S. troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, and Haiti.”

“Yes, a dozen people are killed every day by the repressive government there, and the U.S. just backs them up,” a woman replied.

2005 Socialist Workers Party election campaigns
Petitioning schedule to put SWP candidates on the ballot