Vol. 79/No. 12      April 6, 2015

Militant/Linda Avers

Dan Fein, Socialist Workers candidate for mayor of Chicago, right, discusses importance of oil strike with Michael Garcia outside his home in Whiting, Indiana, a few blocks from BP refinery.

The April 7 election is a runoff between incumbent Rahm Emanuel and Jesus Garcia, both Democratic Party candidates. Neither they nor any of the other candidates were able to win 50 percent of the vote Feb. 24.

Fein has used his campaign to build support for the national oil workers’ fight to defend safety on the job and strengthen their union. “Workers all across the country have a stake in your strike,” Fein told strikers he talked to at the rally.

“I graduated from high school in Junction City, Kansas, which is a farming community,” Al Reid, a metals mechanic at BP, told Fein. “I used to bale hay and clear fields for neighbors. Farmers face the same corporate plight as the regular working man. The government is just big business.”

“What we need is a labor party that can fight for the interests of workers and their allies, including farmers,” Fein said. “The bosses and the Democratic and Republican parties that represent them are enemies of both farmers and workers. We need our own revolutionary working-class party to chart a course toward taking power and establishing a workers and farmers government. We need to run the country, not the capitalist class.”

Fein and campaign supporters also knocked on doors in a working-class neighborhood in Whiting, Indiana, just blocks from the BP refinery.

“I was at my neighbor’s barbecue last summer,” Michael Garcia told Fein, “when a compressor exploded at BP. It shook the ground.”

“A man in my building used to work at the BP plant,” Garcia said. “Day after day he left to be at work at 5 a.m. and got off at 5 p.m. There’s not time for much else.” Long days and massive amount of overtime, and the toll they take on workers, are a central issue in the strike.

Margarita Vega, a graphic designer and mother of three, was excited to learn about the SWP campaign. “Look at what the Cuban socialist revolution did,” Fein told her. “They not only got rid of the Batista dictatorship, but the workers took over the factories and the peasants got the land they worked. Rents were lowered to 10 percent of their income.”

“Even if you buy a house,” Vega said, “It’s really not yours. If you can’t afford the taxes it’s taken away. I know many people who face this.”

To learn more about socialism, Vega got a subscription to the Militant and a copy of Absolved by Solidarity, about the Cuban Revolution.

“I think that the government should be in the hands of the working class. The government is a dictatorship of capital where the two capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans, take turns maintaining the system that exploits working people,” Fein told Raynard Williams, 18, who was waiting for a bus at 95th and State Street, a public transit center on the majority-Black South Side of Chicago March 21. Williams had just gotten off work at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“The capitalist system is based on keeping profits high and wages low,” Fein said. “That’s why the fight of fast-food and Walmart workers for higher wages is so important.”

“When I lived in Iowa last year, I worked at a Hardee’s,” said Williams. “Walmart, Hardee’s and Burger King are all on the same street there and we marched demanding $15, but things are still the same.”

“There will be a protest here on April 15 as part of a national day of actions for $15 per hour and a union,” Fein said. “Workers at Walmart just won a wage increase to $9 an hour. The bosses feel pressure from the protests. The unemployment rate is going down, so to keep workers from quitting and going elsewhere for higher wages, the bosses are pressured to pay more.”

“Keep me informed. I might be able to get to that,” Williams replied.

“I’m against unions,” Jerry Brown, a telecommunications worker, told Fein. “I was a union member where the president was a lawyer and made $235,000 a year. It did nothing for us.”

“The unions have to be transformed from what they are today,” the socialist candidate replied. “As struggles grow, workers will see that we are the union, not the top officials. We have to change the unions into fighting mass organizations that we lead and use to mobilize working people, both nonunion and union, to fight effectively.

“A big problem is that the unions are tied to the Democratic Party. The Democrats and the Republicans are the enemies of working people,” Fein said. “No matter which one wins it won’t change things for working people.”
 
 
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