WWP kicks off campaign at union women's
conference
Over 5,000 women workers gathered in Chicago
March 11-12 for the AFL-CIO's Working Women 2000 conference.
It was an exciting gathering of some of the most enthused,
energized women in the labor movement.
Could there have been a better place to kick off Workers
World Party's Campaign 2000? Here was an opportunity to reach
out to women workers with a message of class struggle.
That is just what a WWP delegation led by presidential
candidate Monica Moorehead did.
The AFL-CIO leadership used the conference as a major
staging ground for their effort to mobilize workers into Al
Gore's presidential campaign. So for any workers open to
other ideas--and many were--the WWP campaign's alternative
proposal about how to wage the workers' struggle stood out in
stark relief.
Like the conference participants, Moore head and
vice-presidential candidate Gloria La Riva are women workers
and union members. Women of color, socialists, seasoned
leaders in the working-class struggle--they could not be more
different than either serial killer George W. Bush or phony
"labor candidate" and real millionaire Al Gore.
Because of Moorehead and her comrades, workers at the
conference got to hear about the socialist alternative. As
women left a March 11 plenary session at which Al Gore spoke,
they were handed Moorehead/La Riva brochures explaining why
building an independent movement of the workers and oppressed
is the right road for labor.
That evening, at a "meet the candidate" reception,
Moorehead talked one-on-one with women workers about WWP's
program of independent struggle by the workers and
oppressed.
Moorehead is pictured here at the women workers'
conference with Karen J. Hikel and Judy Campbell of the
Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace.
Hikel and Campbell, along with some 18,000 others, are now in
the second month of their strike against the Boeing Co.
WWP members at the conference also distributed thousands
of fliers calling for labor to mobilize to bring workers to
the May 7 rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal at the Theater at Madison
Square Garden. Many workers said their unions have passed
resolutions supporting Abu-Jamal.
--Shelley Ettinger
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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