Socialist Workers Party Statement

Demand massive gov’t public works program to provide jobs

May 4, 2020

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Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party 2020 candidate for president, issued the following fighting program April 22. Malcolm Jarrett is the party’s vice presidential candidate.

The Socialist Workers Party demands the federal government immediately fund a massive public works program to provide jobs at union wages for the millions tossed out of work. This is the road to protect the working class from the blows the crisis of capitalism is inflicting on us. They can build hospitals, housing, schools and day care centers, and replace crumbling infrastructure, things workers need.

Workers and our unions urgently need to fight for such a program to undercut the competition workers face for scarce jobs today — an antagonism that bosses use to press us to accept lower wages and dangerous working conditions. To try and get us to acquiesce to these conditions, the capitalist rulers bombard us daily with “We’re all in this together.” It’s a lie! Their attacks on working people will accelerate as they move to restart production and rake in profits.

The bosses also try to divide working people by scapegoating immigrant workers while they exploit them. My campaign demands amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S.

Workers need to work! It is only at work that we can act together, utilize our power and stand up to the bosses — the foundation for all progress for our class. Only there do we go through struggles that bolster our confidence and strengthen our trust in each other and our capacities to fight. This is already happening among workers at Walmart, the railroads and other places where a section of our class is still on the job.

The longer we are laid off and isolated from one another, unable to sell our labor power to the bosses, the more demoralization will fester.

My campaign points to what is possible and needed — deepening our struggles towards wresting workers control of production. As we fight we will need to set up committees of workers and consumers to combat the bosses’ production of shoddy goods, counter their refusal to make what workers need, open their accounts to show everyone how they waste resources, and fight to control the pace of production and hiring to establish safer working conditions and protect the environment.

Making inroads for workers control of production will show the working class as a whole we are capable of organizing society in our own interests. It will pose more sharply the need to overturn the class dictatorship of the propertied families.

Workers need our own party — a labor party — to fight to take political power out of the hands of the bosses and bankers and to establish a workers and farmers government.

A labor party would give voice to each and every struggle we are conducting — from union strikes like that of copper workers against Asarco bosses; to the fight for the arrest of cops who killed Walmart customer Steven Taylor in California; to working farmers struggling to assure the right to their land and a living; to workers organizing together on the job today against the attacks of the bosses.

A fighting labor party would attract and help lead all others who face oppression and exploitation under the lash of capitalist rule.

SWP candidates and supporters are meeting workers interested in joining us in fighting for this program: in Walmart parking lots, at truck stops, taxi and Uber stands, and on workers’ doorsteps in cities, small towns and rural areas far and wide. Join the Socialist Workers Party’s 2020 campaign!