NEW YORK — “The working class is not getting what we need. Wages aren’t enough. Health care is going down the drain,” retired fireman Mike Morale told Paul Mailhot, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor, Oct. 5. Mailhot was campaigning door to door in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. “Democrats and Republicans can’t even get a budget together,” Morale said, referring to the government shutdown in Washington. “You can be sure rich people will get paid without a budget, but not workers.”
“The entire capitalist system is organized around profit-making for a small handful of super-rich ruling-class families, not what the vast majority of working people need,” Mailhot said. “Workers need to organize ourselves, build unions to strengthen solidarity, and fight for amnesty for immigrants working in the U.S. in order to cut across the divisions the bosses use against the entire working class. Workers need political power. The Socialist Workers Party is committed to that fight.”
Morale is originally from Trinidad. When Mailhot commented on the history of militant labor struggles there, Morale agreed. “Yes, lots of oil workers” joined those battles, he said. “Our class is an international class,” Mailhot responded. “Examples of struggle anywhere help workers around the world figure out how to fight effectively.”
Morale said he was interested in what the SWP candidate had to say, and would read the Militant. The previous night Mailhot spoke to an audience of 50 at a Militant Labor Forum on “A working-class answer to today’s economic uncertainty, political assassinations, Jew-hatred and imperialism’s march toward World War III.”