The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.18           May 11, 1998 
 
 
All Out For The `Militant' Sub Drive  
Below are a few of the recent reports on sales of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

"In three days we sold four subscriptions and 25 copies of the Militant," reports Maggie Trowe, who is part of a regional sales team visiting packinghouses and college campuses in the Midwest. Trowe said the team also sold seven subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial and 26 copies of the Spanish monthly, one copy of the Marxist magazine Nueva Internacional and three pamphlets - two on women's right to choose abortion and one on the 1984-85 Hormel meatpackers strike.

"We've been to five packinghouses, including Farmland in Albert Lea, Minnesota; Swift in Worthington, Minnesota; John Morrell in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the IBP plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, and the Hormel plant in Freemont, Nebraska." Trowe, herself a meatpacker, said the sales team also went door to door in Worthington and Sioux City selling the socialist press.

Socialist workers from Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh are participating in the team over the course of the week. They are hitting campuses as well, and plan to wind up in Des Moines and Burlington, Iowa, and East Moline, Illinois, for the contract vote at Case Corp.

*****

Candace Wagner, a member of the United Auto Workers in Philadelphia, said, "Last week we went to the Port of Wilmington in Delaware, where we met a member of the executive board of the International Longshoremen Union who bought a copy of the Militant. She got excited about the dock workers' struggle in Australia, and declared, `We are internationalists.'"

Wagner said the Militant team went back to the port over the weekend and met two Koreans "who invited us on board a ship and took us into the mess room. We had a discussion about the union movement in New Zealand." The team went back a third and fourth time and sold nine copies of the Militant to warehouse workers and longshoremen.

*****

Kevin Dwire in Cleveland and Margrethe Siem in Boston sent in their battle plans for making their goals in the campaign to win new readers. Here's what Dwire wrote:

"We discussed our goals at a meeting last night and approved the following battle plan:

"Supporters of the Militant who are members of the United Steelworkers union and the United Auto Workers may need to stay later at work to meet with people on other shifts, drawing up lists of co-workers to approach. One UAW member is taking a day off to go on a regional team. We want to get a team out to the area around Buckeye farms, a giant egg production facility where there has been a union organizing drive, and a fight against the pollution and pestilence created by the presence of several million chickens.

"The plan has us hitting several campuses - Kent State, Cleveland State, Akron, Ohio State, and possibly Oberlin College.

"We also have a team going down to the MSI strike in Marietta. A striker told us over the phone that a second plant in their amalgamated local is now also on strike. We'll get the information on that, visit both picket lines, and do some door-to door-sales. A real bedrock of our sales effort is going to be fielding door-to-door teams each evening in different working-class neighborhoods."

Siem in Boston laid out their plan to make the goal:

"The main highlights are a conference on 100 years of struggle against U.S. imperialism at Roxbury Community College; the plant gate sale to longshoremen at the shipyard; the May Day rally; the Harvard book fair; and Harvard Square street fair on May 3.

"The last weekend we will do a regional team. One supporter is laid off and can join any team here or nationally. In addition to the highlights, we will also organize daily door-to-door teams in working-class communities, and sales at campuses and plant gates. We will also continue renewal calling to subscribers with the aim of getting more contributions to the Militant Fund drive and to sell New Internationals."

Siem said socialist workers in Boston sold two subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial to members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees at plant gates, and eight copies of the Militant to workers at the Bath shipyard in Maine last week. "We also sold two Militant subs at Bowdoin College during a two-day trip to Maine," she added.

*****

In New York, Militant supporters Rose Ana Berbeo and Megan Arney said they sold several copies of the paper at a protest and march for Kosovan independence April 24. "After the protesters chanted `We'll give up our lives, but not Kosovo,' which is a popular chant with thousands of Albanian students protesting in Pristina, Kosovo, we showed them the issue of the Militant that carried an article on Kosovo with that chant as the headline," said Berbeo. One student from Columbia University, who had come from Pristina six years ago, bought a copy of the paper and pointed to the article that quoted Miljat Cakaj, a member of the Independent Students Union at the University of Pristina. "I went to school with his sister. We are using the same chants here as in Pristina."

*****

"We sold more than $1,200 worth of Pathfinder books and pamphlets, 17 subscriptions to the Militant, seven PM subs, and eight copies of New International at the Los Angeles Times Festival of books," said Carole Lesnick from Los Angeles. "There was an increased interest in politics this year and the booth was quite a beehive of discussion." Supporters in Los Angeles have built up steam in the campaign, selling more than 50 Militant subscriptions and nearly 30 subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial over the past two weeks. They have already exceeded their goal for sales of New International by 44 percent.

*****

"I got an opportunity to discuss with my co-workers the challenges we face and how our [contract] struggle is linked to other fights waged by workers around the world," wrote Mary Martin, a member of the International Association of Machinists at Northwest Airlines in Washington, D.C. "We spent time on the informational picket line. One ramp worker from East Africa and a mechanic from the Caribbean decided to subscribe to the Militant." Martin said she also sold five Pathfinder titles to co-workers, including the new book Black Music, White Business.

 
 
 
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