http://themilitant.com/2017/8131/813104.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 31 August 21, 2017
(front page)
SWP takes support for miners strike to workers
BY EDWIN FRUIT
AND MICHELE SMITH
KELLOGG, Idaho — Members of the Socialist Workers Party campaigned door
to door to introduce the party to workers in the Silver Valley region of
Idaho Aug. 3-4. We came to attend an Aug. 2 rally in Coeur d’Alene by
silver miners, members of United Steelworkers Local 5114 who are on
strike at the Hecla-owned Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan. We campaigned
among workers here and in Osburn, and visited with some of the workers
who had signed up for Militant subscriptions and bought books on the SWP
program during previous visits.
During part of the trip we were joined by Pat Scott, a Walmart worker
from Federal Way, Washington, who learned about the silver miners strike
from the party. She talked up the need to back them with her co-workers
and they sent a poem of solidarity to the strikers. Union President Phil
Epler told Scott, “Your poem is still on our wall at the union hall and
it’s not coming down!”
In response to the deepening crisis of the capitalist system today, SWP
members are centering the party’s work on talking to workers on their
doorsteps — from apartment buildings in New York to homes in Idaho’s
Silver Valley. Their goal is to expand the party’s reach, introduce
workers to Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? and The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record, both by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes,
and Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by SWP leader Mary-Alice
Waters, and to boost circulation of the Militant.
Joe Barnes, who had just got off work driving a garbage truck throughout
the Silver Valley region, invited us onto his porch for discussion. Mary
Martin, the SWP candidate for mayor in Seattle, explained her party
supports the silver miners strike and that she had attended their rally
in Coeur d’Alene two days earlier. She said the party had come to help
win support for the miners and to campaign for her party, a
working-class party.
“I see those signs supporting the miners in yards everywhere while I’m
working. Their point on not giving up union control of safety is
absolutely right,” Barnes said. “I feel like everything is pointed
against us. I work overtime and holidays and yet every month I scramble
to pay for my son’s health insurance premium, not to mention my used car
payments and everything else.”
“We need health care, not insurance,” Martin said. We need to fight to
expropriate the giant pharmaceutical monopolies and the hospital
corporations and run them under workers control. That way we can
eliminate the insurance profiteers from health care. They don’t do
anything except tell us what care we can’t get and charge us for it.”
“Like you I’m not for the Democrats or Republicans,” Barnes said. “The
problem is we don’t have any say in what happens to us. They make all
the decisions, based on the corporate interests that pay them off.”
‘Press to unify working class’
“The propertied ruling families fear us today because they know that the
crisis of their capitalist system means we have no choice but to fight
for our lives and our futures, like the silver miners are doing,” Martin
said.
“As we fight to defend ourselves we need to press to unify the working
class. The attacks of the bosses and their government won’t end until
our class takes political power out of their hands, which will take a
revolution, like the Cuban people did in 1959,” she said. “The SWP
focuses on meeting workers on their doorsteps, at strike picket lines
and other protests, to meet working people like you who are looking for
a way to fight back effectively.” Barnes decided to get an introductory
subscription to the Militant to follow the party’s activities.
Martin visited with Dixie Lepo, a retired construction worker here who
in April had signed up for a Militant subscription and bought Are They
Rich Because They’re Smart? “Come in and get out of the heat,” she said,
as temperatures soared above 95 degrees.
“I’m so glad that your paper says what they’re doing to Trump is a witch
hunt, because it is,” Lepo said. “I love it when he talks about fake
news, because that’s what all the other newspapers and TV news is.”
“The target of the witch hunt is the working class,” Martin said. “The
rulers and their media spokespeople know that no matter what happens to
Trump, he got in because working people are angry and looking for
change. They say we’re too stupid to make those kinds of decisions. It’s
fine for us to vote for whoever we want, as long as they get to choose
who the candidates are. We make bad choices, they say, and need to be
managed by the smart people, like is explained in the book Are They Rich
Because They’re Smart? you bought.”
“You’re right,” Lepo said. “And it’s not like I go along with Trump on
everything. But on the immigration problem, he is trying to make it
better, letting people come here who have high skills instead of no
skills.”
“We say we need to demand amnesty for all undocumented workers. We say
if you are here you should be able to stay and not live in the shadows,”
Martin replied. “All workers should be organized in unions and we should
fight as equals for our common interests.”
“Well I can see that point also,” Lepo said. “Without farmworkers we
wouldn’t have the food we need. I tried picking fruit one time and it
was real hard work. I’ve met some farmworkers and they’re real good
people.” Lepo decided to renew her Militant subscription and to get a
copy of The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record.
Fruit and Martin also met Denise Angle, the mother of a striking silver
miner, on her doorstep in Osburn. “My son has been at the mine for nine
years,” Angle said. “I want them to settle the strike but it has got to
be fair. I want my son to see this paper.”
She got a copy and asked that we send her a copy with the article on the
rally, while she makes up her mind about getting a subscription. We said
we’d get back in touch with her and her son.
Martin and Fruit knocked on the door of a man named Paul, who said, “I’m
a retired city employee and a conservative Republican so probably we
don’t have much in common.”
Martin explained her party is knocking on doors to discuss the crisis
facing the working class and to defend the silver miners. “Neither the
Democrats nor Republicans have any solutions for the catastrophe facing
our class — from lack of jobs and health care to 25 years of young
workers being killed and maimed in Washington’s imperialist wars to the
exploding disaster of opioid addiction today. We explain that the witch
hunt against Trump is directed at the working class.” Martin showed him
the front-page articles in the latest Militant and The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record. “This book is the best book that explains
last year’s election results,” she said.
“I never thought I would get anything from a socialist,” he said,
thumbing through the book, “but I think I would like to read this.” He
got it, along with the copy of the Militant.
“We are not all the same in this country. There are two classes,”
striking miner and Militant subscriber Lewis Elam told us when we
visited, saying this was the main point he got out of reading the two
books by Jack Barnes he had bought. “We are the working class. The
problem is we are not organized and working together.”
“You’re exactly right,” Martin said. “Our most pressing need is to unify
the working class to fight in our interests. What you and the miners are
doing here gives an example to workers everywhere on how to stick
together and fight for safety, for your union, for the future. But it
will take a socialist revolution to remove the capitalists from control
over our lives and our jobs once and for all.
“I’m going to Cuba in October where workers made and have defended their
revolution for almost 60 years. Their unions do control the conditions
of work and the wealth they produce goes back into society,” Martin
said. Elam got the current copy of the Militant, saying he wanted to
resubscribe when his finances improved. But he wanted this issue, to
check out the coverage about the Cuban Revolution.
At the end of this three-day visit to Idaho, including door-to-door
campaigning and joining in the USW rally and on their picket lines, SWP
members had signed up 10 subscribers to the Militant, and sold three
copies of The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record and one of Are They
Rich Because They’re Smart?
And we met and deepened relationships with strikers and others following
politics in the area that we intend to build on.
Related articles:
Striking Idaho silver miners gain backing from unions in Northwest
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