Vol. 78/No. 12      March 31, 2014

Socialist workers Dave Ferguson and Susan LaMont from Atlanta visited workers on the picket line at Kellogg Company’s cereal plant in Memphis, Tenn., March 14-15. The 220 members of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 252G have been locked out since Oct. 22. Ferguson and LaMont also attended the March 15 “Unity in the Community” support meeting for the workers.

Local 252G member Marvin Rush bought Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs. He first saw the book when Ferguson and LaMont met him on the picket line in December and was struck by how the Minneapolis Teamsters in the 1930s won unemployed workers to the union cause.

“It’s important to know your history,” he said. “What the Teamsters did is a powerful example for today, because the employers use the same old dirty tricks, trying to pit the unemployed against the unions. Instead, it was brothers and sisters standing together.”

In addition to Teamster Rebellion, Rush got a Militant subscription and The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free, one of 11 books on special offer with a subscription (see ad below).

Two other Local 252G members signed up to get the paper and two workers who subscribed last fall decided to renew. Nine others bought single copies.

Militant supporters from Seattle attended a March 15 rally outside the detention center in Tacoma, Wash., where some 250 people demonstrated to back immigrant detainees on hunger strike against being deported.

“It looks like that paper is covering issues that others don’t,” said Thomas Kaplan, 20, a student at Western Washington State University in Bellingham, who signed up for an introductory subscription. “I don’t want to just interpret things, I’m interested in being in the middle of activism.” Kaplan came to the detention center with farmworkers from Skagit Valley, north of Seattle.

From Auckland, New Zealand, Patrick Brown reported that cabinetmaker Steve Hayman renewed his subscription when Baskaran Appu and Felicity Coggan called at his workshop March 11.

“The Militant provides something I don’t get through other media,” he said. “I particularly appreciate finding out about the conditions of the working class in the United States, people there standing up and aware of what’s going on.”

Hayman also bought a copy of Voices From Prison: The Cuban Five.

“We visited subscriber Ian Dobson, a retired electrical worker, on March 15,” Brown wrote. “He told us he likes ‘reading views in the paper — for example, Ukraine, although I’m on the other side on that one.’ When we asked him for his views, he asked what right Ukraine had to break with Russia, when it had historically always been part of it. We explained that Ukraine has a long independent history. He listened with interest, but finished up with, ‘I’m with Putin on this one.’”

Dobson decided to renew his subscription for a year.

Jacquie Henderson in Omaha, Neb., reported that along with Ruth Robinett she visited a local Ukrainian church March 16 to talk with people about the Militant’s call for defense of Ukraine sovereignty, Russian troops out, and to invite people to a Militant Labor Forum on this topic March 22.

“Our whole history, from the time of the czars, is a history of our land being taken, our culture and our language being denied,” Olesia Reichowskys told them as she signed up for an introductory subscription. “Stalin came in and did the same thing the czars had done for centuries. I learned Ukrainian from my grandparents, my parents spoke Russian, the language of work as Stalin forced them into the collectivized land projects.”

“We have a saying,” Reichowskys said. “‘The Ukraine is easy to conquer, but impossible to rule.’ I am happy your paper is printing the facts of our struggle so that people in this country can read them. I haven’t seen a socialist newsweekly before but I’m interested to take a look at it.”

To renew your subscription, to get a new one or to join the campaign to sell the paper, contact a distributor listed on page 6 or the Militant at (212) 244-4899.  
 
 
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