During a four-day campaign visit to the Chicago area, Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Rachele Fruit joined the Labor Day parade and festival organized by the Chicago Federation of Labor in the historic Pullman district of Chicago Aug. 31. Her campaign set up a large literature table of the Socialist Workers Party, meeting scores of fellow workers. Fruit is a hotel worker and member of UNITE HERE.
Alona Smooth, a medical records worker and member of SEIU Local 73, told Fruit, “During the pandemic my eyes were really opened up to how little the politicians cared about us. If they ever do anything, it is never exactly what we need. The amount of work and low pay was more than many people in the health care industry could take and they left. The union fought for pay raises before and after COVID. We have to keep organizing.”
“As part of the labor movement’s fight for the interests of the working class, our campaign defends women’s right to reproductive and maternal health care, sex education that is not gender indoctrination, access to the safest and most reliable contraceptive methods and safe and legal abortion procedures,” Fruit said. “Workers need our own party, a party of labor, to lead a fight for universal child care and medical care as part of the fight for jobs, wages and cost-of-living protections. This is the road to advancing the fight for women’s emancipation.”