“We’re going out. Oct. 1 we’re going out, they’re not talking,” Anthony Bailey, a longshore worker, told Rachele Fruit, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, outside the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1416 hall in Miami Aug. 11.
Some 45,000 dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas are preparing to hit the streets if a new contract isn’t in place at the end of September. Stopping automation and defense of their jobs is a key issue for the union, along with winning a wage increase to cover high prices. Bailey got two copies of the Militant and a campaign flyer so he could share them with a friend.
“It’s about time I renewed my Militant subscription,” Sean Carter, another dockworker, told Fruit. He also picked up a copy of Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes after Fruit said, “This book is about the meritocratic upper-middle-class social layer that the Democratic Party more and more represents.”
In a discussion with Louis McKinnon, Fruit pointed to the way her campaign and the Militant build solidarity for union fights.
“I can see the Democrats and Republicans don’t care about workers,” McKinnon said. Along with a subscription to the Militant, he got The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward; Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? and The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class. “I always like to read Malcolm X,” he said, adding in Malcolm X Speaks.
Fruit and her running mate, SWP vice presidential candidate Dennis Richter, are joined by party candidates in 11 states and Washington, D.C., as the working-class alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.
The SWP campaign fights for a government-funded public works program to create union-scale jobs building housing, child care, hospitals and other things working people need.
SWP candidates support union demands for cost-of-living escalator clauses to increase wages, pensions and social programs like Social Security, to offset the scourge of high prices. They call for a 30-hour workweek with 40 hours pay to prevent layoffs and increase available jobs.
The Socialist Workers Party candidates defend Ukraine’s independence and demand Moscow get out now. They call for the unions to take up the fight against Jew-hatred and to defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews.
“The only way these demands can be effectively fought for and won,” Fruit says, “is for workers to break from the bosses’ parties and build a party of labor. A party that can be used to organize and mobilize working people in our millions, union and nonunion alike, on the road to taking political power.
Endorse the SWP campaign!
“I endorse the campaign for Rachele Fruit, the SWP presidential candidate who speaks for workers at home and abroad,” Jerome Crawford, a member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 111 at the Bimbo plant in Grand Prairie, Texas, told co-worker Hilda Cuzco. “I don’t think dictators should be invading neighboring countries in a land grab like in Ukraine.”
Crawford is one of 11 SWP campaign endorsers in the plant. “I think all jobs should have respectable wages and benefits, plus safer conditions,” he said. “To accomplish this, we working people need a party of our own.”
A truck driver from Arlington, Texas, also endorsed the campaign. David Murlith, originally from Kenya, told campaign supporters at a truck stop that he thought both the Republicans and Democrats are for rich people, agreeing with the need for a labor party and amnesty for all immigrants in the U.S.