Vol. 77/No. 25      July 1, 2013

Militant/Tamar Rosenfeld

Dan Fein (right), SWP candidate for New York mayor, speaks with Kirk Gammon in East New York, Brooklyn, June 16. “Stand firm. I support what you are doing,” Gammon said.

“And then there are those of us who work for a living — the working class, whose interests the Socialist Workers Party defends.”

Fein and the rest of the SWP ticket in New York — John Studer for Comptroller, Deborah Liatos for Public Advocate, and Róger Calero, Seth Galinsky and Sara Lobman for Bronx, Queens and Manhattan Borough President — have been campaigning door to door and winning subscribers to the Militant, the campaign newspaper, in working-class neighborhoods throughout the city.

“I agree,” Gammon responded as he signed up for a subscription to the Militant. “The teachers are mistreated and scapegoated. The unions are the backbone for poor people that raised the standard of living for workers. I support what you and your paper are doing. Stand firm.”

As the candidates have campaigned, from Staten Island to the Rockaways, Little Italy in the Bronx to Harlem, they have asked working people to join them in solidarity with workers resisting attacks by the bosses on their wages, working conditions and dignity. Fein and Liatos traveled with campaign supporter Mario Ottoniel, a construction worker, to march with active miners and retirees in their June 4 protest in Henderson, Ky., against Patriot Coal’s effort to use the bankruptcy court to gut the United Mine Workers contract and slash health care and retirement.

Fein also joined the June 12 protest organized by the Municipal Labor Committee, a coalition of city workers’ unions that organize some 300,000 transit workers, teachers, workers in the various city departments and others, who have been forced to work without contracts for years by the administration of Michael Bloomberg.

“The Socialist Workers Party campaign is not concerned with balancing the city government budget,” Fein told Mitchell Singletary, a member of Communications Workers of America Local 1180, at the rally, “but rather the budget of workers who have seen their rent, food and transportation go up without receiving a pay raise for years.”

Singletary signed up for a Militant subscription to follow the campaign and working class struggles and got a copy of The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free. “I’m sure glad I ran into you here today,” he told Fein.

On June 13 about 150 people participated in a forum for Queens Borough President candidates sponsored by the New York City South Asian Civic Engagement Coalition. On the panel were Democratic Party candidates Leroy Comrie, Melinda Katz and Peter Vallone, Republican Tony Arcabascio and Socialist Workers Party candidate Seth Galinsky. The forum was translated into Bengali and Nepali.

Forum moderator Annetta Seecharran gave each candidate a minute and half to respond to each of five questions, including what could be done to tackle “hate crimes” against South Asian and Guyanese-Indian immigrants.

The Democratic and Republican candidates all said they were for adding more hate crime laws to the books.

“Where do racism and violence against immigrants come from?” Galinsky asked. “The deportations and scapegoating of immigrants by the government and claims that undocumented workers are stealing jobs create an atmosphere that encourages this.

“The labor movement should take the lead in calling for an immediate and permanent end to the deportation of workers without papers,” he said. “We need to say that whatever language you speak, wherever you were born, whether you have papers or not, we should fight together against the bosses and we should demand that the government launch a public works program at union-scale wages to build the things working people need, from affordable housing to mass transit.”

“I’m glad there was a socialist on the platform,” college student Christine Rheem told Galinsky after the program. “You don’t usually get a chance to hear that point of view.”

Nancy Boyasko contributed to this article.  
 
 
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