Vol. 80/No. 33 September 5, 2016
‘Our priority is one-on-one discussions with workers’
While in the region, Perasso and SWP campaigners visited the picket line of members of United Auto Workers Local 1508 locked out by Honeywell Aerospace in Green Island since May 9. The company also locked out union members in South Bend, Indiana.
“The Socialist Workers Party stands with your struggle,” Perasso told Pat Fisk and other pickets. “We point to fights like yours as examples of working-class resistance that deserve the solidarity of unions, workers and small farmers everywhere.
“We’re getting good support from the community and other unions,” Fisk told Perasso, who is a member of the United Transportation Union on leave from his job as a freight rail conductor for CSX Transportation to campaign.
“The bosses are on a campaign across industries and borders to get us to accept lower wages and rising health care costs,” Perasso said. “This is their answer to the economic crisis. The Democratic and Republican parties back the attacks by companies like Honeywell.”
SWP presidential candidate Alyson Kennedy walked the picket line with locked-out UAW Local 9 members in front of the Honeywell facility in South Bend Aug. 17. Tom Ross told her the company “had brought in people to watch us work for two months before the contract expired and now they’re scabs doing our jobs.”
“Your struggle, which is an example of resistance and deserves solidarity, shows that there are two classes in the U.S., the capitalist class and the working class, with sharply counterposed interests,” Kennedy said. “The Democrats and Republicans defend the capitalist class. My party defends the working class. I will use my campaign to win support for your fight.”
Trump, Clinton campaigns flounder
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is leading Republican Donald Trump in the polls, but both parties are divided, and both candidates continue to poll highly negative ratings.For several weeks a wide spectrum of bourgeois political figures and their journalistic mouthpieces have ramped up a shrill and vitriolic campaign insisting “Trump must be stopped at any cost.” The New York Post called it “the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.”
The majority of the U.S. capitalist rulers are telling the Republican Party nominee he won’t be president. Trump’s response is to charge that the elections will be “rigged.” Trump told a North Carolina rally that if restrictive voter ID laws are not enforced, people will be “voting 15 times for Hillary.”
The FBI has disclosed it has found 15,000 new Clinton personal emails on government business that it will release publicly before the election. Republicans in Congress are calling for charges to be filed against her.
And new revelations show Clinton used her position as secretary of state to raise millions for the Clinton Family Foundation — which took in $278 million in 2013 alone — from people looking for “access” and favors from the State Department.
Clinton’s response has been to try to deflect the spotlight from herself by ramping up charges that Trump has financial ties to Russia and China, and is a “Kremlin puppet.”
‘Workers should control production’
Perasso also campaigned door to door in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., population 3,400, where residents have been dealing with water contaminated by toxic perfluorooctanoic acid, a carcinogen used in Teflon, from four Honeywell and two Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics plants there.“They’ve covered up the water problem for 18 months,” Melissa Dufresne, a retired nurse’s aide, told the socialist campaigners. “The chemicals have been in the soil and pipes for years. Nothing is being done.”
Jennifer Rawlings, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, told Perasso, “My house is now worth zero because of the water. A lot of people got up and left, but I can’t move because I’m retired. ”
“The Socialist Workers Party urges workers to fight for a national government-funded public works program to employ millions at union-scale wages to repair the decaying infrastructure and build things workers need, from more housing to schools to medical and day care centers,” Perasso told Rawlings. “Many towns and cities have decaying and contaminated water systems, from Flint, Michigan, to Hoosick Falls, and they should be rebuilt from top to bottom. The owners of Honeywell and Saint-Gobain should be held accountable and should pay for the reconstruction here.
“The bosses and their government prioritize profits over human needs. To bolster profits, they jack up production rates, make our jobs more dangerous, endanger the environment and slash public funding, letting everything fall apart,” he said. “We have to build a movement of workers that can fight for safety on the job and to take control of the stewardship of nature. The two go hand in hand. If workers had political power and controlled production, we wouldn’t be facing these disasters.”
Both Rawlings and Dufresne got copies of the Militant and asked socialist campaigners to come back for further discussion.
Willie Cotton in New York and Dan Fein in Chicago contributed to this article.
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Struggle over right to vote in US continues today
SWP campaign confronts Tenn. curbs on voting rights
Working-class fight for right to vote marks US history
Join the Socialist Workers Party campaign!
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