For $15 an hour and a union!

The following statement was released March 31 by Eleanor García, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California.

I will use my campaign as the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate to continue to organize and fight along with others for an immediate and substantial raise in the minimum wage and for unionization for all.

The fight for $15 and a union has drawn thousands of workers into street mobilizations and has the support of millions more. This fight has won concessions. The legislative action on the minimum wage by Gov. Edmund Brown Jr. is aimed at heading off the independent mobilizations of working people and drawing us into voting for one candidate or another of the ruling rich.

Working people welcome any raise in the minimum wage, but Governor Brown’s bill would not reach $15 until 2022. Sixty million workers in the U.S., 42 percent of all workers, earn less than $15 an hour. We need relief today from the effects of a slow-burning depression that means stagnant wages, the crushing cost of living and persistent unemployment. The governor says that the bill “takes into account the vagaries of the capitalistic economy,” by stating that if unemployment goes up, the economy slows, or there is a state budget deficit, the wage increase will be stopped. That’s guaranteed.

Workers create all the wealth. The capitalists always strive to drive down the cost of labor to increase their profit rates at our expense. That is why workers and bosses are in constant conflict over which will rise, wages or profits.

I have walked the picket line of striking Kaiser nurses in Los Angeles fighting for a contract and have joined the picket of warehouse workers at California Cartage fighting for their rights and dignity on the job. But our labor unions have shrunk in size and power. Union officials have refused to mobilize us to fight, instead telling us our only hope is to elect a Democrat or Republican. But tying our fate to the bosses’ parties is the opposite of what we need.

We need to organize the unorganized and rebuild the unions, organizations that can unite and defend the working class. We need our own party, a labor party, based on the unions that will break with the capitalist parties and rely on our solidarity, power and mobilization of workers.

This would be a step toward overturning the dictatorship of capital that we live under today. A step on the road to replacing the bosses’ government with a government of workers and farmers, like working people have done in Cuba.

Related articles:
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Join spring activities to build Socialist Workers Party
SWP candidate backs fight to prosecute California cop
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On the Picket Line
London ‘tube’ drivers strike against unsafe trains

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