BY GREG McCARTAN

NEW YORK-"Our campaign defends and salutes the workers and others in Lebanon who stood up and fought the occupying Israeli army, and who did not bow down to the incessant bombardment backed by Washington," said Laura Garza, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. vice president, in an interview here April 30.

"The cease-fire agreement does not address the central issue: that Israel must withdraw from Lebanon now!" Garza said. "It is Tel Aviv's occupation of southern Lebanon and the denial of Palestinian self-determination that propels fighters in Lebanon and among Palestinians to continue their struggle."

Local SWP candidates have spoken out on this question. Doug Douthat, running for U.S. Congress in Michigan's 12th C.D., condemned Washington's backing of Tel Aviv at the Militant Labor Forum in Detroit April 26. He spoke on a panel with Taimaa Hussein and Tina Farhat, who helped organize a walkout at their high school to protest the bombings, and with Rana Khraizat, a founder of the Michigan Arab Student Coalition.

In the interview here, Garza took up the minimum wage debate in Congress, which the Democrats are using as a way to gain electoral advantage over the Republicans.

"Workers aren't being offered a solution with the 90-cent increase spread out over several years, a raise that won't make up for increases in the cost of living since the last time the minimum wage was raised," she said. The officials of the labor movement-most of whom support Clinton-accept the parameters of the Democrats' plan, she said. "What we need is for the labor movement to organize a fight for a real living wage - union scale - more like $12 an hour rather than a poverty level wage of $5.15 an hour. This so-called `debate' is nothing more than trying to get tens of millions of workers-in their majority young, female, and of oppressed nationalities-to think that this is the best we can hope for," she added.

Fighting for a livable wage must be part of the labor movement taking on the fight for "Jobs for All!" That is one of the central demands the Socialist Workers campaign places on the government, Garza said. "We can demand the workweek be shortened with no cut in pay to spread the available work, and fight for a massive public works program to put people to work building the schools, roads, housing and hospitals we need, " she said.

"The bipartisan agreement on the U.S. federal budget approved this past week registers another step in the chipping away at the social wage," Garza said, "in programs such as housing, health care, and education. But it does not contain the massive cuts the Democrats and Republicans were looking for. Even the leaders of the Republican freshman class acknowledge their so-called `revolution' ran into resistance among millions of working people."

The assault by the wealthy owners of the banks, mines, mills, and land, Garza said, is happening with increasing intensity in every capitalist county. Garza pointed to the April 26 announcement by German chancellor Helmut Kohl that he hopes to freeze unemployment pay and salaries of state workers, reduce sick pay covered from employers from 100 percent to 80 percent, reduce unemployment benefits, and other steps that would amount to a $33 billion cut in the federal budget. Kohl said the measures "demand that people adjust and lower their expectations."

Socialist Workers presidential candidate James Harris, who worked at the Hormel meatpacking company in Atlanta and is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, is on a two-week delegation of trade unionists from the United States to the 17th Congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers. He will participate in a massive workers march May 1 in Havana as well.

Speaking tours by the candidates will begin May 11 for Garza and May 18 for Harris. The candidates will join teams of supporters at plant gates, visit factories, present the socialist alternative on college campuses and citywide platforms, and hold press conferences along with local socialist candidates in the area.

The tours will build on the campaigning local candidates and supporters have already begun. Roni McCann, a button sewer and member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) in Cleveland, described a campaigning team outside the Joseph and Feiss plant where she works.

On the morning of April 12, several UNITE members and officials handed out flyers at the plantgate denouncing Republican congressman Martin Hoke for his position on labor issues. The leafleting was part of the AFL-CIO's $35 million "voter education" effort. That afternoon, Young Socialists and other supporters of the socialist campaign passed out literature for Harris and Garza and sold the Militant to workers coming out of the factory.

"One worker thanked a campaign supporter for the information," McCann said, "and related his story of voting in the last presidential elections. `I spent an hour arguing with the poll worker who did not want to allow me to write `None of the Above' on my ballot. I told her it was different than not voting at all and it was the vote I wanted to cast, and anyway isn't it supposed to be a secret ballot?' "

In a follow-up story on the AFL-CIO election efforts broadcast on National Public Radio April 25, a reporter ended her story by saying that of the three garment workers she polled that day, "One plans to vote for the Democratic Party, one for the Republican Party, and one for the Socialist Workers Party."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home