Socialist program for working people

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Weinstein for supervisor!

A8 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1984 We live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. San Francisco! Tourist mecca. Cultural events, night life, fancy hotels, and restaurants. "Baghdad-by-the-Bay." It's all here-if one has the money.

Yet San Francisco is not just one city, but two.

• City of the rich. Pacific Heights mansions. Towering corporate highrises. Expensive living space and dining places for the well-heeled and well-fed.

• City of the workers. Employed and unemployed-and the very poor. Sweatshop garment factories. Minimum wages. Small, overcrowded apartments. Exorbitant rents.

In the El Cerrito Apartments, 270 Turk Street: "Faye Balunsat lives with her husband, a clerk for Municipal Railway, and five children in a one-room, $445-a-month apartment. 'The mice are running everywhere, she said. 'If we leave any food in the kitchen, they eat it.'' (San Francisco Chronicle, June 20, 1984) On the tenth floor an old man had a heart attack. Firemen carried him down. The elevator is "broken"-for a long time. This is the elevator that crushed to death a 4-year-old Vietnamese boy some months ago.

Many are even worse off, hard hit by unemployment. They are Asians, Blacks, Latin-American refugees.

This is a prosperous city with a budget surplus! Yet the homeless sleep in the street in sight of luxury hotels, and huddle in soup lines a block from the Hilton Hotel.

The politicians can spend $60 million to rehabilitate the cable cars-for the tourist industry-but where is the money for maintaining MUNI buses and streetcars?

The schools are understaffed and overcrowded while thousands of teachers remain unemployed.

The mayor and the supervisors, all Republicans or Democrats, serve the tourist industry, the corporations, and the real-estate interests-while working people are being driven out of San Francisco.

We, the working people, keep the luxury hotels running, but we can't afford to stay at them. We keep the hospitals open, but we are gouged out of our savings when we are ill.

We work in the garment sweatshops that produce the expensive clothes that eat up our paychecks. We work in the high-priced restaurants, where a day's pay barely covers the cost of one meal. We work in the industries that close up shop, move to another state or country where the wages are lower, and throw us out of work.

Working people produced the wealth that built this city. But working people don't run the city. The Democrats and Republicans run this city for the rich. Their motto is "Profits-First-Lastand-Always."

Our motto is "Human Needs Before Profits. Working People Make the City Run-Working People Should Run the City"

That is what Sylvia Weinstein's campaign for Board of Supervisors is all about. That is what Socialist Action is all about.

Sylvia Weinstein is a Socialist. She is running for the Board of Supervisors to bring working-class representation into city government. A vote for her is a vote of protest against government by the rich and for the rich.

A CAMPAIGN PROGRAM FOR WORKING PEOPLE WE HAVE A RIGHT TO A JOB • No layoffs of city workers-expand the work force to improve city services. • Cut the workweek to 30 hours with no cut in pay to provide jobs for the unemployed at union scale wages. • Tax the corporations to provide funds for jobs and social services. • Affirmative action to end discrimination against women and minorities. • Comparable pay for comparable worth for women in the workforce. • Job training for young people at union wages. • No building permits for contractors who run "two-gate" jobs (one entrance for union workers, one for non-union). Penalties for "run-away shops." • Solidarity with workers fighting against employer demands for concessions. City policy should be to support workers' struggles for better working conditions and wages.

WE HAVE A RIGHT TO AFFORDABLE HOUSING • Strict rent control without legal loopholes. • Stop replacement units by condominiums. • The stratospheric level of current rents should be cut back to an affordable price. • Subsidized housing for city's homeless.

WE HAVE A HEALTHCARE • More funds for city health facilities and staff. Emergency funding for San Francisco General Hospital to prevent disaccreditation. • Adequate public financing for AIDS research. Stop attempts to legislate sexual behavior by closing the bathhouses. The victims are not to blame. • Better pay and working conditions for city healthworkers. • City policy should promote the right to free medical care for all on a local and national level. • Funds for abortion clinics. • Stop the harassment at the city's abortion clinics.

EDUCATION IS A RIGHT • More funds for our overcrowded and understaffed schools. • Rehire laid-off teachers and reopen closed schools. • Reduce class size for a better learning environment. • No more cutbacks in City College and community college programs. • Expand bilingual education. • City funds for free public childcare centers.

STOP ALL GOVERNMENT AND POLICE HARASSMENT • City policy should provide for aid and refuge for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees—and all who are persecuted in their homelands. • Stop all City cooperation with the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) round up of undocumented immigrants-many of whom will face persecution or death if deported. • Stop all police harassment in the Black, Latino, and gay communities. • Voters here approved Proposition N in 1983, which called for an end to U.S. military aid to El Salvador. City policy should be to actively promote opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America.

WE HAVE A RIGHT EXPANDED CITY SERVICES • Tax the corporations to provide funds for city services and social programs. • Upgrade MUNI service. Free public transportation. • Funds for libraries, services to the elderly and disabled, and food for the hungry. • Municipalize public utilities. We need gas, electricity, and phone service. These utilities should serve us, not the private enrichment of large corporations.

HOW CAN THESE PROGRAMS BE FUNDED?

San Francisco is the world headquarters for financial giants such as Bank of America. Downtown San Francisco is etaise Sylvia Weinstein is a long-time activist in the women's and socialist movements. She joined the San Francisco National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1973 and served on its executive board from 1975 until 1982.

She was active on the Reproductive Rights Committee and the Equal Rights Committee of NOW. She organized the first Day in*the Park for Women's Rights in 1973 and was on the steering committee of Day In The Park until 1982. She co-chaired the March for Women's Rights in 1982. She is a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women.

She served on the Childcare Initiative Task Force, set up by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, as well as the Health and Childcare Committee of the San Francisco one of the world centers of wealth and power, and yet working people can hardly afford to live here. The social services working people depend on are in decline.

The way to reverse this state of affairs is to make the corporations pay. Tax the corporations, banks, and insurance companies to pay for social services in San Francisco. The corporate wealthiamassed here was extracted from the sweat and blood of working people.

HOW CAN WORKING PEOPLE BRING ABOUT THIS PROGRAM?

This program for San Francisco is realistic and fair. But to bring about the much-needed change, where the human needs of the majorty are the city's priority, working people need to organize a new social movement outside of the two parties of the ruling rich.

We must organize a movement that can tap the enormous social power of working people, women, Blacks; the unemployed, and everyone who has a stake in real social change.

We must rely on ourselves-in the streets, on the job, and in the elected offices. That is how every right we have ever won has been accomplishedthrough mass social movements on a grand scale.

Above all, we need a political party to fight for the needs of working people—a labor party based on the unions. san rrancisco boara or supervisors Commission on the Status of Women.

She was chairperson of the Children's Center Expansion Committee of the San Francisco Unified School District, which was instrumental in gaining $1.6 million in additional funds for children's centers.

In the winter of 1983 she helped organize the Greyhound Strike Support Commiftee. She was active in the "Yes on Proposition N" campaign that opposed U.S. intervention in El Salvador.

She is the mother of two daughters and has three grandchildren.

Sylvia Weinstein joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1945. In 1983 she became a member of Socialist : Action, a revolutionary workers' organization. She is a columnist for Socialist Action newspaper.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are carrying out an all-out assault on social programs and on the living standard of working people.

Both the Democrats and Republicans have overseen a vast stockpiling of nuclear weapons since World War II.

Both the Democrats and Republicans have led tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths in wars against the Korean and Vietnamese people-and today threaten a new "bodybag" policy in Central America.

The bipartisan policies of the two parties are responsible not only for a declining standard of living but for a rising "standard of death and war" in this capitalist world.

The Democratic and Republican parties believe that capitalism is here to stay for all eternity. But they are wrong. Our wealth, our industry, all of our productive ability as a society, comes from nothing else but the hard work and energy of tens of millions of people.

But our social wealth is owned by private interests. We believe that all of the basic decisions on the use of our resources and industry should be made by the people who produce the wealth.

There is no "lesser evil" between the Tweedledum Democrats and the Tweedledee Republicans.

Don't waste your vote by voting for the Democrats or the Republicans.

Vote Socialist in 1984. Vote Weinstein for Board of Supervisors.

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NO SIMPSO D-pored feb 151h by I.N.S