FORT WORTH, Texas — “We’ve been on strike going on nine weeks. We have a lot of union support, but we need more,” Rick Miedema, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 997 on strike at Molson Coors big brewery here, told Socialist Workers Party candidate for president Rachele Fruit April 19. Fruit was here on a four-day campaign stop.
Fruit, a hotel worker in Miami and member of UNITE HERE Local 355, joined the Teamsters picket line to show her solidarity and learn more to build support as she tours around the country and abroad. Joining her was Alyson Kennedy, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas.
The brewery workers are fighting for pay raises, to keep their union health care, and for better retirement plans. Negotiations have broken off.
“The company wants to break the union here as they have done at other Molson Coors facilities that were organized by the Teamsters,” said Miedema, pointing to the need to build and strengthen the unions. “The railroad line that comes into this plant is nonunion. The trucks that take products in and out are nonunion. If the workers at these companies had a union, it would help us to win the strike.”
“There are about half a million workers who will be in contract fights this year. Workers are in a mood to fight,” Fruit told Miedema. “We are raising the need for workers to break from the capitalist parties, to form our own party, a labor party based on the unions. It would reach out to organize all working people, to fight for class interests, starting with solidarity with each other’s fights.”
“I agree with that 100%,” Miedema said, asking the SWP candidates to help spread the word about their fight. Fruit said that’s exactly what she planned to do.
At an SWP campaign rally the next day, Fruit described her visit with the Molson Coors strikers, how Miedema had told her and Kennedy, “We’re not going back without a fair contract.”
“The future of humanity depends on the U.S. working class taking power away from the capitalist rulers and starting down the road to a socialist revolution,” Fruit told the meeting. “The fight over which class will rule is the central question that matters for working people everywhere in the world. And the U.S. working class is decisive in that fight.
“The U.S. is a weakened imperialist power today, but still the most powerful,” she said. “Its rulers are determined to defend their position throughout the world, as do their competitors, allies and enemies alike.
“We oppose U.S. troops, bases, armaments, all of it, anywhere in the world,” she said. “Their aim is to prepare for wars, which will never cease until the working class takes political power.
Workers stand up and fight
“We see workers today standing up and fighting, seeing each other for the first time in a new light,” she said. “They are recognizing their humanity and their capacity for solidarity. They see themselves as fighting not primarily for themselves but for future generations of workers.”
Fruit pointed to the central importance of workers’ fights to defend constitutional freedoms under attack today. “The various frame-ups against Donald Trump cooked up by the White House and Democratic prosecutors are meant to prevent him from running for president and prevent millions from voting for him.
“It is the working class that will have to fight to defend these rights — freedom of speech, assembly, of worship and the rest — and defend them for everyone, including our political opponents and enemies.
“None of us can control how the class struggle will unfold,” she said. But the Socialist Workers Party is in tune with it, we are part of it, we respond to it. Our experience — from the Big Three autoworkers, the VW organizing drive in Tennessee and much more — shows workers are in a mood to fight.
“We say workers need a political weapon independent of the bosses’ parties. A labor party would explain that no worker has to die on the job. We need workers control of safety and all aspects of production,” she said. “It would fight for a government-funded public works program to provide jobs for all at union-scale wages, to build schools, hospitals, bridges, mass transit and other things workers need, and for cost-of-living adjustments to our wages and benefits to combat inflation.
“It would fight to unite all workers together, regardless of race, creed or nationality,” she said. “It would demand amnesty for undocumented workers, and encourage all workers to join unions and fight together.
“It would fight for a working-class foreign policy, from Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself from Jew-hatred and pogroms to Ukrainian workers’ determination to beat back Moscow’s deadly invasion.
“If you agree that our class needs to break and form a party that represents our class interests, you can express that by supporting the Socialist Workers Party campaign,” she said. “I urge you to endorse the campaign, to join in campaigning with us.
“Our campaign will, first and foremost, defend the Jewish people. The Oct. 7 pogrom, carried out by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad with help and direction from the reactionary capitalist government of Iran, slaughtered 1,200 people — mostly Jewish civilians — left more than 5,000 wounded, seized over 240 hostages and raped scores of women.
“But since April 13, Israel is no longer just confronting Iran’s proxies. Iran launched 320 missiles and drones, the overwhelming number of which were knocked out by Israeli forces and others, including several Arab regimes in the area.
“I issued a statement, which says, ‘The fight against Jew-hatred and pogroms is decisive for the working class the world over.’ As the crisis of the capitalist rulers deepens, ‘they will turn to fascist forces to divide, attack and seek to crush workers, the oppressed and the unions. The rulers will raise the banner of Jew-hatred to scapegoat Jews as the enemy, not the capitalist system.’”
Fruit pointed to the importance of the new book from Pathfinder, The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
“It shows that the Socialist Workers Party is rooted in the continuity of the communist movement in the fight against Jew-hatred, as in all other key class questions,” she said. “This goes back to the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution led by V.I. Lenin in 1917, Leon Trotsky’s battle to defend that legacy against Stalinist counterrevolution in the 1920s and ’30s, and the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959.
‘No better thing to do with your life’
“Capitalist production has drawn hundreds of millions of people into the working class — from Asia to Africa and Latin America — and they are being drawn into world politics in a new and urgent way,” Fruit said. “The same thing is true of working people here in the U.S. They are beginning to see our class as a social force with immense potential power.”
She urged those at the meeting to get involved in the SWP campaign. “There is no better thing you can do with your life.”
Alyson Kennedy told the meeting that the SWP intends to put its presidential ticket on the ballot in six states in 2024 — New Jersey, Tennessee, Washington, Minnesota, Vermont and Louisiana. “The Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami branches of the SWP are taking responsibility to get the party on the ballot in Louisiana. We will begin the week after next with a team in the Shreveport area and other parts of the state in the summer.”
During the discussion, Gerardo Sánchez said he had attended a sugarcane workers conference in the Dominican Republic along with Fruit, bringing greetings from his union, Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 111. The Dominican unionists in turn sent greetings to the International Flavors and Fragrances workers, who were on strike in Memphis, Tennessee, that he delivered.
Meeting participants ate a delicious dinner before the program and contributed $1,290 to the SWP national campaign.
Alyson Kennedy contributed to this article.
