“Hospital nurses are given responsibility for too many patients and then face losing their license if they make a mistake,” Kathleen Kelly told Candace Wagner, Socialist Workers Party candidate for New Jersey General Assembly, and socialist campaigner Jenny King when they knocked on her door in Tom’s River township to introduce the party and its program. Kelly works as a private home nurse.
“I work on the railroad. The bosses there are shortening training periods and cutting crew sizes,” Wagner replied. “It’s the same thing all over.” The SWP campaign explains the capitalist bosses are driven by competition for markets and profits to try to force workers to work ever harder and faster, with utter disregard for our safety. Workers need to organize and use union power to fight for workers control over production. This is the only road to enforce health and safety, to halt pollution and the making of dangerously flawed products like the Boeing 737 MAX.
The SWP and sister Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are on a seven-week drive to expand the reach of the Militant and books by revolutionaries, as well as raise $115,000 for the paper. The goal of the effort is to help the party systematically reach out in towns, cities and rural areas to meet and develop ongoing political collaboration with working people.
Wagner explained she was building May Day actions demanding driver’s licenses for immigrants. Kelly said, “It was hard for me to get a license! You need six forms of ID. Why should they get a license just like that?”
“Requiring all these forms of ID is bad for all workers,” Wagner said. “The SWP calls for amnesty for the 11 million people in the U.S. without documents. It’s a way to unite working people so we can fight together against the impact of the crisis we all face.” Kelly described the challenges confronting immigrant workers she looks after as they try to get health care they need and can afford.
“I still haven’t made up my mind about driver’s licenses, but I’m against the deportation of immigrants. I’d like to come to the May Day rally,” Kelly said. She got a Militant subscription and three books on working-class politics. Party members are offering books by party leaders and other revolutionaries worldwide at 20% off as part of the drive.
David Clos-Sasseville met Communist League members Katy LeRougetel and Joe Young when they knocked on his door in Villeray, Montreal, April 21. He said he opposed the Quebec government’s moves to ban the wearing of religious symbols at work by many government workers.
“The unions should be campaigning on this, to unite workers against the proposal,” Young said, explaining that the government is seeking to divide working people and scapegoat Muslims and immigrants to divert us from seeing that capitalism is our common enemy.
“The problem with the unions is they only act on specifics related to workers’ immediate conditions, instead of organizing broadly,” Clos-Sasseville said.
“That’s it!” he exclaimed when Young showed him Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. The new book explains why organizing to strengthen the unions is essential and why a “tribune of the people” uses every aspect of capitalist oppression to explain that working people are capable of transforming themselves in struggle and building a movement that can take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers. Clos-Sasseville got the title and a Militant subscription.
In his introduction to the book, SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes says that books by revolutionaries “place us in history, along the line of march of working people around the globe.”
To find out more about the books, the Militant and the SWP, or to join in the effort, contact the branch nearest you.