“I’d be talking to one truck driver and another one would call me over and ask to see the paper,” said Chauncey Robinson, a Young Socialist from Newark, New Jersey. She was describing an early morning visit on September 26 she and Socialist Workers Party members Steve Clark and Sara Lobman made to truck drivers and longshore workers at Port Newark.
“The trucks were lined up, waiting, which they don’t get paid for,” Robinson said. “We spent only about an hour and fifteen minutes at the port, but nearly every truck driver I spoke to bought at least a copy. There was a lot of interest in the organizing campaign in Miami,” (see front-page article). The Newark subbing team of three sold 24 copies and 3 subscriptions.
A similar team from California went to Kearny and Hayden, Arizona, last weekend to sell subscriptions to striking copper miners and other working people in the area and report on the facts about their struggle (see front-page article). “The majority of the nine subscriptions we sold were either to strikers or other unionists,” reported Frank Forrestal from Los Angeles. One of the strikers who subscribed also picked up The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning.
New subscribers can purchase this pamphlet, normally $3, for just a buck. The book Cuba and the Coming American Revolution and the two newest issues of the Marxist magazine New International are also discounted with a sub, at $5 and $25 respectively.
Militant readers from Des Moines, Iowa, went to Norfolk, Nebraska, to meet with workers at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant there. Hundreds of the 1,500 workers at that plant are from Somalia. These workers, in their majority Muslim, have been fighting company efforts to deny them the right to take prayer breaks. “Workers told us the company has begun firing them for taking unauthorized breaks and bosses are following workers to the bathroom to make sure they aren’t praying,” said Mary Martin of Des Moines. “After a manager followed a woman to the bathroom and then tried to fire her, 300 workers walked off the job.” The team spoke to workers at the plant during shift change and met with union officers and others. In the end, seven people subscribed and 27 bought a copy.
A special regional subbing effort aimed at linking up with the working-class resistance in the packinghouses in the Midwest will take place around the October 8-9 weekend.
More than 230 of the week’s subscriptions were sold at the September 24 antiwar rallies across the United States. These included 143 in Washington, 32 in Los Angeles, 20 in Salt Lake City, 14 in Seattle, 8 in San Francisco, 6 each in Boston and Birmingham, and 2 in St. Louis.
We encourage all readers to join this campaign to sell Militant subs—perhaps thousands of them.
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