The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.16           April 27, 1998 
 
 
Workers At Plant Gates, Picket Lines Subscribe To The 'Militant'  

BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
As the drive to win new readers to the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and the Marxist magazine New International reaches the midpoint, Socialist Workers candidates and campaign supporters are using the campaign newspaper to reach farm workers, meat packers, workers on strike, farmers, and students. While distributors in some areas are building momentum, there's work ahead to get the circulation drive on schedule.

We welcome Militant supporters in France to the chart this week. Young Socialists members in Paris adopted goals for the subscription campaign, and have so far sold 10 copies of Nouvelle Internationale.

Organizing to meet lots of workers and youth - and systematically following up with those who are interested in the socialist press - is key to selling subscriptions. Below are a few reports on recent sales activities.

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Rail worker Craig Honts reported from the Central Valley region in California, "We have sold 11 subscriptions to the Militant and one subscription to Perspectiva Mundial while campaigning for Marklyn Wilson, Socialist Workers candidate in the eighth Congressional District." Honts is part of a regional team that will travel throughout the valley talking to poultry workers, farm workers, and others. They will wrap up the trip in Watsonville where a rally to defend bilingual education is planned.

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Socialist Workers candidate Lea Sherman from Houston wrote, "We have combined sales of the press and petitioning to get my campaign on the ballot for the 29th Congressional District." Sherman said a petitioning and sales team sold two Militant subscriptions to Teamsters on the picket line at Laidlaw Environmental Services, a hazardous waste disposal plant in Deer Park, just outside of Houston. The 180 workers went on strike August 7 against Laidlaw when the bosses demanded concessions that included an insurance co- payment and an end to a pension plan. Management and temporary workers are operating the plant.

"We sold a subscription to a striker who bought a copy of the paper last year from a Militant supporter who came to his house," Sherman said. "He recognized the member of the sales team who had sold it to him and readily signed up for the paper when he saw an article on the 252 locked-out oil workers who continue their pickets at Crown Central Petroleum."

Many Teamsters are familiar with the struggle of these refinery workers against the Crown bosses, who insisted on gutting their seniority and replacing the union workers with temporary contract labor. Supporters of the socialist press in Houston have sold seven Militant subscriptions to Crown workers since the beginning of the sales drive -one right after the team campaigned at Laidlaw and visited the Crown picket line.

On April 9 a sales team drove to Texas A&M University in College Station, where they set up a table in the "free speech area" and sold a Militant subscription. They also organized to get a representative of the Socialist Workers campaign to speak to a class there.

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"So far, we've sold six copies of the new issue of the Militant with the front cover article on the wharfies struggle on the picket lines," wrote Militant supporter Ron Poulsen from Australia, after receiving last week's bundle. "We joined 500 other workers in a mass picket to successfully prevent trucks with containers from entering the Patrick terminal at Port Botany in Sydney." Poulsen added that an all-day sales team in Parramatta, Sydney, sold one Militant subscription, 12 copies of the paper and New International no. 8 with the article "Che Guevara, Cuba, and the Road to Socialism."

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"We met our target of selling six Militant subscriptions for the week," reports Jill Fein from Atlanta. "We sold a subscription to a student who came to the Militant Labor Forum after meeting a sales team at Georgia State University." One student attending the National Conference of Black Political Scientists purchased a Militant subscription and participants at the event also bought 30 Pathfinder titles. Fein said Militant supporters there sold a subscription to a woman from Ireland who was standing at the front door of the Pathfinder Bookstore waiting for it to open.

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"We sold nine copies of the Militant and one subscription at the WHX (Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel) gate in Yorkville, Ohio, on March 27," wrote Cecelia Moriarty and Chris Marshall from Pittsburgh. "We set up a table of Pathfinder literature across the street from the plant with signs saying `U.S. Hands off Iraq' and `UAW wins strikers' jobs back at Caterpillar.' One steelworker getting off work decided right away to subscribe after hearing a brief description of the paper. He had never seen the paper before. We introduced ourselves as fellow steelworkers from Pittsburgh and pointed out that the paper had covered and supported their strike." The 10-month-long struggle of 4,500 steelworkers ended last July with the union winning an industry-standard pension.

"Two people asked if it was a communist paper," the two socialist steelworkers added. "One worker stayed to talk because he was surprised that anyone would be a communist. After a discussion about our election campaign and defense of affirmative action, he bought a copy of the Militant."  
 
 
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