A glance at the "In the Unions" columns of the subscription drive chart shows the challenge that remains to close the gap between the goals and current low sales to co-workers and other unionists. Efforts in the past week by socialist coal miners in the United States are an example of what Militant and Perspectiva Mundial supporters in the factories, mines, and mills can accomplish.

Tony Lane, an underground coal miner and member of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in southwestern Pennsylvania, took advantage of the Veterans Day holiday to meet with five of his co-workers. Two of them decided to renew their subscriptions and a third bought a copy to check out. Lane has made plans to meet up with another miner before the end of the drive.

A worker at the McKinley mine on the Navajo Nation, near Gallup, New Mexico, bought a Militant subscription. In 2000 workers at that mine and in Kemmerer, Wyoming, waged a successful strike against Pittsburg and Midway, the company that owns both pits. Jason Alessio, a union miner who recently ran as the Socialist Workers Party candidate for congress in Colorado, met with a co-worker over the weekend and signed him up for a subscription as well.

Betsy Farley, a surface miner from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, joined a team of socialists selling the socialist press door-to-door near the site of this summer’s Quecreek mine disaster in Somerset, Pennsylvania. Miners are standing up to pressure from the coal company and the government, and telling the truth about the bosses’ responsibility for the flood that nearly took the lives of the nine mine workers who were trapped underground for three days.

People in that community bought several copies of the Militant with coverage on the state mine safety hearings where Quecreek miners testified. Farley spoke with one retired miner, a longtime member of the UMWA, who worked for many years in the abandoned Saxman mine, adjacent to Quecreek and the source of the flooding. He bought a six-month subscription to the Militant after explaining he was tired of the lies being printed in local newspapers claiming that the company is not to blame for the near-fatal disaster.

Farley has also talked to several co-workers about Washington’s war moves against Iraq. Two of them decided to purchase copies of New International no. 7, which includes "Opening Guns of World War III; Washington’s assault on Iraq."

These efforts over the past week added six subscriptions toward the goal set by miners in the United States.

Street campaigning continues
In what has become a familiar sight on several street corners in New York City, four socialist street agitators set up a table Saturday, November 9. They took turns speaking through a bullhorn in English and Spanish while standing on a milk crate--often drawing a small crowd to their table.

Garment workers, messengers, office workers and students stopped on the crowded sidewalks of Manhattan’s garment district to hear the socialists present a program to defend working people against the consequences of the deepening economic depression, explain the underpinnings of Washington’s war moves against the people of Iraq, and take up other political issues.

One college student bought the pamphlet Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara, central leader of the Burkina Faso revolution in the early 1980s. A copy of New International in each of three languages--English, Spanish, and French--two Militant subscriptions, and one subscription to Perspectiva Mundial were also purchased by those who stopped to talk with the socialists.

"Unlike the big business parties that stop campaigning when the elections are over," said Laura Anderson, a sewing machine operator in a New York garment plant who participated in the sales activities that day, "the socialist campaign doesn’t stop on election day. We keep going out into the streets to build the communist movement."  
 
 
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