SWP ballot drive in New Jersey gains ground
https://themilitant.com/2021/03/20/swp-ballot-drive-in-new-jersey-gains-ground/
SWP ballot drive in New Jersey gains ground
BY VIVIAN SAHNER
Vol. 85/No. 12
March 29, 2021
UNION CITY, N.J. — Supporters of the campaign of Joanne Kuniansky and
Candace Wagner, the Socialist Workers Party candidates for governor and
lieutenant governor of New Jersey, made steady progress during the
second weekend of a six-week effort to put the SWP ticket on the ballot
and introduce the party’s activity and program to working people.
See directory to contact party campaign office nearest you.
By March 15, 467 signatures were collected, just shy of a third of the
1,500 signatures campaign supporters plan to collect, almost double the
800 required.
One highlight of the weekend was a trip to Bridgeton, a city of 25,000
in a farming area in the southern part of the state. Each year 25,000
seasonal farmworkers come to South Jersey to harvest fruit and vegetables.
“Our strength is that we work,” Lázaro Cornejo, a machine operator at a
meatpacking plant told SWP campaigner Craig Honts on his doorstep. “The
work we do binds us together, it’s what makes us strong.” But “many of
us don’t have any access to medical care, and when we are sick we still
have to go to work. We don’t have the option of staying home. The
pandemic has hit us hard.”
Honts pointed to Cuba’s socialist revolution, where working people took
power into their own hands. After the revolution, medical treatment
ceased being a commodity to be sold at a profit, but became a right
available to all free of charge. Cornejo liked that idea and got a
subscription to the Militant.
SWP campaigner Janet Post discussed what working people could do to
resist the impact of today’s capitalist crisis with Herb Willis Jr., who
works for a boat manufacturer. “The only way to win what we need is to
fight for it together,” Willis said. “If all the truck drivers across
the country went out on strike, we could win almost anything.”
Post described the huge labor battles that built the industrial unions
in the 1930s. “Teamsters in Minneapolis organized to win support for
their strikes from other workers, the unemployed and farmers. They
became confident they could win,” she said. In the course of those
struggles they forged a leadership that showed what working people are
capable of doing.
She showed Willis the 2021 Pathfinder catalogue with the four-volume
Teamster series by Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the SWP and central
organizer of the strikes and organizing drives that transformed the
Teamsters union in the Midwest into a fighting social movement. Willis
signed the petition and told Post he wants to order the books.
Workers need to fight for jobs
“If the government is going to offer help, it should help everyone. But
we got nothing because both my husband and I are still working,”
Jennifer Martinez told SWP campaigners Gale Shangold and Terry Evans on
her doorstep in Paterson.
Martinez described the mounting cost of utility bills, feeding their
children at home with no school meals available, and the challenge of
trying to do her job as an accountant at home and look after three
children at the same time. “I’ve got a deadline to be back in work in
June,” she said. “But what if the schools aren’t open then?”
“Workers don’t need one-time handouts. We need jobs,” Shangold said,
referring to the government’s most recent “stimulus” package. “That’s
why SWP candidates call on unions to wage a fight for a federally funded
public works program to put millions back to work at union-scale pay
building the things we need.”
There is a special expanded ballot effort in New Jersey March 19-22. To
join campaign teams there or anywhere else, contact the nearest party
campaign office.
Ky. SWP launches campaign, ‘Workers need their own voice’
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — “Working people need a voice and a movement,” Margaret
Trowe told Rebekah Dow of WLKY-TV as she interviewed the Socialist
Workers Party candidate for mayor at a press conference outside City
Hall March 12. “Like the 18…
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in the interests of “all Americans.” Workers and farmers…
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Charles Bukowski “For those who believe in God, most of the big
questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the
God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to
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and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ―
Charles Bukowski