Vol. 79/No. 9      March 16, 2015

“We will continue to speak out on the big political questions confronting the toilers worldwide, outlining a course that advances the interests of our class and our allies among working farmers,” Fein said. “We will stand against Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic violence, which is poison for the working class. We will back the battles of Ukrainian workers to defend their national sovereignty from Moscow’s attacks, as they fight at the same time to defend their jobs and wages, and their social and political rights against attacks from the propertied oligarchs in Kiev.”

“We will join and build solidarity with members of the Steelworkers union on strike, fighting for control over conditions on the job, against dangerously long hours and forced overtime and protection for those who live around the refineries,” Fein said, noting that he had spent election day at an oil workers strike solidarity rally in Findlay, Ohio. “We will advance demands to defend working farmers, who are not able to pay for rent on the land they farm because of sharply falling grain and dairy prices.”

Incumbent Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel failed to get 50 percent of the vote. He now faces a runoff with Cook County Commissioner Jesus Garcia, another Democrat, who came in second with 34 percent. Garcia projects himself as a champion of the neighborhoods.

Emanuel, former chief of staff for President Barack Obama, won his first term in 2011, but lost popularity among many workers and African-Americans because of his attacks on Chicago teachers. Their strike in 2012 won widespread working-class support. Emanuel’s attacks included moves to close 50 public schools, lay off 1,000 teachers and staff, a $30 billion shortfall in the city workers’ pension fund, and continued police brutality.

Garcia has the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union. CTU President Karen Lewis threatened to run against Emanuel herself, but dropped out of the race after she became seriously ill.

The Washington Post called the Chicago race “the latest front in a simmering nationwide battle between the establishment governing wing of the Democratic Party and a more restive, populist wing.”

“There is no difference between the capitalist candidates for working people,” Fein told the 25 people at the forum. “They have different takes on how to divert workers from fighting for an independent road forward, like the workers and farmers in Cuba did when they overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and established their own workers and farmers government.”

“I told workers at the Ohio rally at the Marathon Oil headquarters that I was there because their fight is more important for the working class than the vote in Chicago,” Fein said.

Fein joins striking oil workers’ rally
“I have worked at Marathon for 39 years. I work with two people that I never see during the shift. They work half a mile from me. We communicate by radio,” Larry Jarvis, who came to the Findlay rally from Catlettsburg, Kentucky, where he works at the refinery, told Fein. “My crew used to be four, now it’s two. This strike is due. If we had an explosion it would be worse than Mount Carbon.”

On Feb. 16, a 109-car CSX tanker train carrying volatile crude oil derailed near Mount Carbon, West Virginia, with a number of cars exploding and burning, forcing the evacuation of more than 2,000 people and fouling the Kanawha River.

“The outcome of your strike has everything to do with our future,” Fein said. “We live in a dictatorship of capital where the billionaires own everything — the economy, the government, the courts, the cops and the army. We need to replace their dictatorship with workers power. A revolution will be necessary to accomplish this.”

“I know what’s going on,” replied Jarvis. “You see it every day. What is hard is how to change it.”

“The bosses try to keep us trapped in the two-party shell game, saying we’ve got to back the ‘lesser evil’ capitalist candidate or we’ll get worse. They want to hold us back from exercising our potential power,” Fein said. “We need a labor party. A labor party could mobilize all working people behind the oil refinery strike.”

“Before I worked at the refinery, I worked at Airgas for years. They closed the plant and sold it off, getting rid of the union,” John Limes, an operator at BP-Husky and member of Steelworkers Local 1-346, told Fein. “The unions are a dying breed here. We are not going to build this country back up by paying workers $8 an hour.”

“Our unions have to be rebuilt and transformed,” replied Fein. “And strikes like this will help do this.”

John Studer, editor of the Militant, also spoke at the forum, talking about workers’ resistance to the world crisis of capitalism, from the U.S. to Ukraine.
 
 
Related articles:
NY SWP candidate for Congress: ‘Back oil workers!’
SWP statement on anti-Semitism gets around
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home