Solidarity with TWU strike against SEPTA

Below are excerpts of a Nov. 1 statement by John Staggs, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania and a former member of Transport Workers Union Local 234.

The Socialist Workers Party encourages all workers in Philadelphia and beyond to support the struggle of TWU Local 234 members to defend their health care, pensions and their union, and to enforce work rules that protect the safety of workers and riders.

SEPTA bosses hope to turn workers against the strike. They’re getting help from Democratic Party officials and some union officers who are in a panic about Hillary Clinton’s narrowing lead and are pressing the union to return to work before the election.

Workers and farmers here and worldwide create all wealth through our labor. We produce more than enough to provide health care, education, housing and retirement to every human being, for a lifetime.

Everywhere workers confront the effects of today’s long-term crisis of capitalist profits and production, contracting trade and employment. The bosses have no solution except to take it out on the working class.

We must unite in solidarity with anyone under assault. From this expanding unity, working people can build a movement to take power out of the hands of the ruling families and begin replacing twisted capitalist social relations, where everything is built around profit, to new bonds of human solidarity.

Related articles:
Striking Phila. transit workers insist: ‘No contract, no work!’
On the Picket Line

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