Vol. 79/No. 29 August 17, 2015
As they turned in 2,950 signatures, the candidates were joined by a group of campaign supporters; Glova Scott, who ran as SWP candidate for City Council in Washington, D.C., earlier this year; and the campaign’s lawyer, Larry Otter.
“The signatures, more than two times the required 1,325, were gathered going door to door in neighborhoods throughout the city,” petitioning director Janet Post said, “where working people welcomed the opportunity to hear about a working-class alternative.”
“There is a deep worldwide crisis of the capitalist system. Working people face a ruinous assault on our standard of living and social conditions,” Hart told the press. “Depressed wages, joblessness, speedup on the job, increasingly dangerous working conditions — this is what the employers put on us as they drive to push their profit rates up.
“There is growing working-class resistance to these attacks,” said Hart, who works as an overnight stocker at Walmart. He pointed to the importance of the fight by Steelworkers at ATI and workers at Verizon fighting against concession demands. “The growing social movement for a $15 minimum wage and a union, which John and I are part of, is part of this resistance,” Hart said.
“Our campaign is part of these struggles. We call for workers to break from the two parties of the bosses, the Democrats and Republicans, and build their own party, a labor party based on the unions,” he said.
“Workers struggles — from the fight for $15 to the ongoing struggle against police brutality and cop killings of African-Americans and others across the country — and independent working-class political action,” Hart said, “open the road to taking power out of the hands of the propertied rulers and reorganizing society in the interests of the majority of humanity.
“We can learn from the example of the Cuban Revolution,” he said. “Cuban workers and farmers took power there 56 years ago and have built and continue to defend their socialist revolution, based on human solidarity.”
During the three-week ballot drive, Socialist Workers Party campaigners participated in protests against the beating of Tyree Carroll in Germantown by 26 Philadelphia cops, petitioned outside the International Longshoremen’s Association hiring hall, joined a rally to celebrate 15 years of gains for equal rights won through struggles buoyed by the Americans with Disabilities Act and talked to workers on their porches from one end of the city to the other.
“After college I worked for a program for kids with autism,” Julia DeFalco, 26, told Staggs Aug. 1 on her doorstep in Northeast Philadelphia. “But then they told me I couldn’t remain their employee, I had to become an ‘independent contractor.’ I would have no guaranteed hours and have to pay my own taxes and liability insurance. I said no thanks.”
“Then I got a job in a day care center that promised $10 an hour, but when I got my first check it was for $7.25,” she said, signing the petition. “I had to quit that too.”
“More and more workers are pushed to be temporary workers or ‘independent contractors,’ like they tried to force on you, or to take lower wages,” Staggs said. “The bosses want to put all the uncertainty and burden on the worker, to boost profits. On the West Coast port truckers have organized to fight to be recognized as workers and for a union. And they are having success.”
Join fight against police brutality
“The accumulated public accounts of cops killing and brutalizing working people, building on the profound transformation in peoples’ social outlook produced by the victory of the mass Black-led movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation, has put increasing pressure on the cops and the politicians,” Hart told a Militant Labor Forum here July 31. “When University of Cincinnati cop Ray Tensing shot Samuel DuBose dead during a traffic stop July 19, he was promptly arrested and charged with murder.”This reflects progress forced by historic changes in popular consciousness and the growing Black Lives Matter protests that have drawn thousands into action, pushing the cops back, Hart said. The weekend before Hart participated in the Movement for Black Lives national conference in Cleveland.
“I want to thank Osborne, John and Janet for helping to do the battle to demand justice from the cops who killed my son Frank McQueen,” Delphine Matthews told forum-goers. Cops shot McQueen more than 20 times in June 2014 in Chester, south of Philadelphia. “I still haven’t received anything from the cops and city officials there, no coroner’s report, not even his personal belongings.
“I’m a fighter and I’ll fight to the end,” she said. “Not just for my son, but for everyone — African-American, Caucasian, everyone.” She invited the socialist campaign to join her the next day for a street corner speakout against police brutality.
Hart and other socialist campaigners joined Matthews and others near the Frankford Transportation Center in northeast Philadelphia the next day.
Before the protest, Hart took the campaign door to door in the surrounding neighborhood, telling people about the speakout. “I’m going,” Ikea Coney told Hart, saying her son Darring Manning was beaten by Philadelphia cops last year.
“The Philadelphia campaign is really the beginning of the Socialist Workers Party’s 2016 campaign for president and state offices across the country,” Staggs told supporters at City Hall. “We’ll be campaigning across the city and beyond. We’ll join in the fights against attacks by the bosses and their government.
“We’re campaigning to win people to the Socialist Workers Party,” he said.
Róger Calero contributed to this article.
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