Vol. 73/No. 10      March 16, 2009

As a garment worker and a socialist, I am proud to join in today’s march for dignity. Phoenix is one of the flash points in the fight for the legalization. I pledge that my campaign will support every protest against raids and deportations and for legalization.

In the last 13 months, the bosses have cut 3.6 million jobs in the U.S. For the bosses the crisis is a decline in their profits, but for working people, our crisis is unemployment, lack of health care, homelessness.

One of the consequences of the capitalist economic crisis is deepening competition among individual workers for jobs. Sheriff Arpaio is trying to scapegoat immigrant workers for the economic crisis. He says he can fix the state’s budget problems by denying undocumented workers in the city’s jail access to health care, shackling them, and marching them in a chain gang into a desert jail.

This is not only an outrageous attack on immigrant workers, but a threat against all working people. The fight for legalization is an integral part of improving the conditions for all workers. The bosses use people’s immigration status to drive down wages for everybody.

The solution isn’t to kick people out. Instead of having a layer of workers intimidated, we need to be in a stronger position to organize unions and fight together.

My campaign is explaining that working people need to take political power out of the hands of the ruling class and establish a workers and farmers government. This is how we can defend ourselves from mounting layoffs, cuts in health care and education, and greater assaults on workers’ rights.

Workers need to fight to build the kind of unions we need—unions that do not subordinate labor’s interest to those of the bosses. Under capitalism there is no equality of sacrifice. Workers need to put our interests as a class first.

If elected, I will fight for legislation to shorten the workweek with no cut in pay to spread the available work around, and for a federal program to provide jobs, through a massive public works program at union-scale wages to build schools, hospitals, and affordable housing.
 
 
Related articles:
Arizona action fights cop immigration raids
Demands end to sheriff’s vigilante gangs
L.A. settlement reached for May Day ’07 cop riot
Maryland rally demands rights for immigrants
UK strikes: blow to unity of working class
 
 
 
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