The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 71/No. 41      November 5, 2007

 
From the campus to the coalfields,
‘Militant’ subs sell
(front page)
 
BY PAUL PEDERSON  
The subscription campaign is gearing up. Campaigners in Washington, D.C., have now raised their quota twice, bringing it up to 160 subs. So have supporters of the socialist paper in Des Moines and Pittsburgh.

In the past week 328 subs were sold, keeping the seven-week campaign well ahead of pace at 56 percent.

The Militant’s top seller this week is Frank Forrestal of Des Moines with 13 subscriptions. At second and third place are Dan Fein from New York and Sara Lobman from Newark, with 12 and 11 subs, respectively.

Forrestal was part of a campaigning team to Gillette, Wyoming, where some of the biggest coal mines in the country are located. Twenty-five people, most of them industrial workers in the coal, gas, and oil industries, subscribed. Fifty bought copies of the paper.

Fein sold many of his subs to taxi drivers who organized a one-day strike this past week. And Fein, Maura DeLuca, and Luis Mendoza, who all work in a Bronx garment plant, teamed up. Mendoza introduced the paper to a friend of his and together they went door to door in his building, selling two subs and three copies, and collecting a $5 donation.

Lobman took part in a conference at Essex Community College called “Race Still Matters.” Of the 300 people in attendance, 20 subscribed and 63 bought copies of the paper and 10 books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press.

Manuele Lasalo reports from Sydney, Australia, that campaigners there netted six subs last week at protests against the repression in Myanmar and while collecting signatures to put the Communist League ticket on the ballot there. Ron Poulsen was the top seller there for the week with three subs.

Printed below is a dispatch on the sales campaign from central eastern Utah. BY BETSEY STONE  
PRICE, Utah—“Keep the paper coming,” a retired union miner told a team of Militant supporters who visited subscribers in mining communities October 20-21. “I don’t agree with everything, but I read it to get news of miners and other union struggles.”

During house visits and sales at the local post office and at the entrance to a mine, the team sold 14 subscriptions.

The retiree has followed the Militant’s reporting on the strike carried out by miners, mostly immigrants, to get a union at the nearby Co-op mine. “The immigrant workers were the ones who first brought in the union years ago,” he said, “and they will help bring it in again.”

John Gutierrez, a retired miner and long-time member of the United Mine Workers union (UMWA), has worked at many mines in the area. “Union mines are the safest mines,” he says. When a foreman wanted his crew to do an unsafe job, he said, “all we had to say was: ‘let’s call in the union safety committee,’ and the foreman changed his mind. That’s what a union is.”

Many of the discussions focused on the collapse at the Crandall Canyon mine where nine miners died this summer, and on the need to fight for mine safety.

“Safety is the union issue,” said a miner who works at Deer Creek, one of only two union mines in the area. The team sold at the entrance during a shift change. Six miners bought copies and one subscribed.

The Deer Creek miner, who asked that his name not be used, said there are nonunion mines where, “if you speak up about an unsafe job, or refuse to do it, they will show you the door.”

Click here to see the 'Militant' subscription drive chart

 
 
 
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