Below is an updated statement by Joanne Kuniansky, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New Jersey. Her statement is available in English, Spanish, Korean and Gujarati on the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission’s website. Patch.com, an online news site, included the statement by Kuniansky in its Sept. 16 article “NJ Governor Candidates: Why You Should Elect Me (In 500 Words).”
Joanne Kuniansky is a union fighter who has worked in oil refineries, railroads, meat packing. She currently is a Walmart deli worker.
The Socialist Workers Party builds solidarity with today’s labor battles, from striking Alabama coal miners to Nabisco workers. Workers face defending themselves from bosses demanding we give up hard-won gains. Kuniansky travelled to Alabama to join a miners’ support rally and got messages of support and contributions from her co-workers to their strike fund.
Unions, the most important defense organizations of the working class, must take the initiative to lead workers to get vaccinated and get back to work, putting us in the best position to fight bosses’ attacks and build solidarity with union struggles, fights against cop brutality.
With millions unemployed and rising inflation, unions need to fight for a federally funded public works program to put millions to work at union-scale wages building hospitals, schools, housing that workers need. Shorten the workweek with no cut in pay to stop layoffs! Cost-of-living clauses in every contract that raise pay and retirement benefits to offset every price rise!
Workers must break from the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties and build a political party of our own, a labor party, based on our unions. The SWP aims to be part of building the leadership we need to unify all those exploited by the capitalist class and replace their rule with a workers and farmers government.
Deaths and financial devastation for thousands of working people in the wake of Hurricane Ida were not caused by “climate change.” They are the product of capitalist rule and all the parties that defend it. Workers were swept away in their cars, drowned in basement apartments. Thousands left to fend for themselves, homeless and without power. The deadly lack of preparedness and belated government response turned a “natural” disaster into a social catastrophe.
The government in Cuba organizes workers and farmers to confront these deadly forces of nature with minimal loss of life. That is only possible because workers and farmers were organized by their communist leadership to make a socialist revolution — to take political power into their own hands and take control of the factories, land and banks from the capitalists, transforming themselves in the process.
My campaign points to the necessity of working people in the U.S. emulating that example and building a party here that can lead millions to make a socialist revolution.
Along that road working people need to fight for the right of women to all family planning services, including safe and secure birth control and abortion, essential for winning women’s emancipation. Whether a woman decides to bear a child or not must be a private, personal matter, not the decision of a legislature or court. We must organize and mobilize to win a majority of women and men for this right.
The working class needs our own foreign policy, we share common class interests with working people worldwide. We oppose all Washington’s wars and demand an immediate end to its economic and political war on the people of Cuba and the sanctions it inflicts on the peoples of Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and other countries.
The SWP calls for unconditional recognition of Israel as a refuge for Jews. We urge unions to protest Jew-hatred — a deadly danger to advancing the class interests and solidarity of all workers and toiling farmers.