Jerry White discusses socialist program with striking Marathon Detroit Refinery workers

Socialist Equality Party candidate for US vice president, Jerry White, visited the picket lines of striking Marathon Detroit Refinery workers last Saturday. Some 270 workers, members of Teamsters Local 283, have been on strike against the third largest US-based energy company since September 4. They are opposing outsourcing, attacks on health care benefits and exhausting and dangerous work schedules. 

Workers told White and SEP campaigners that they were digging in for as long as a six-month strike, like the strike of Marathon workers in Minneapolis-St. Paul in 2021. Negotiations with a federal mediator have broken down, and no new talks have been scheduled. One worker said the company was waging “lawfare” against strikers, including threats of injunctions after the mass picketing on the first days of the strike. 

Marathon, which has made nearly $17 billion in profits over the last year and half, has shipped in management personnel and non-union contractors from its other facilities to operate the Detroit refinery. Right now, the strikebreakers are performing a “turnaround,” i.e., a regularly scheduled process to shut down the facility and inspect, clean and repairs its massive and complex units. Workers said that if personnel were not properly trained this could result in gas and chemical leaks, deadly fires and explosions.  

Striking workers also told White that pipefitters, electricians, railroad and other unionized workers had honored their picket lines and refused to work during the strike. However, crane operators, members of the Operating Engineers union, were now working. “They walked out with all the rest when the strike started,” one striker said. “Marathon doubled their rate, and the crane operators are here now. All the southern crane operators they brought in are unionized too. If every single union stood with us, we could have made headway. But the biggest hold we had was taken away.”

Although there are half a million union members in Michigan, the Teamsters, United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers bureaucracies have isolated the five-week strike by Detroit Marathon workers, the first at the refinery in 30 years. Instead, they have brought a parade of Democrats to the picket lines for photo-ops, including Bernie Sanders and Detroit city council members, who claim to support the striking workers. But the opposite is the case. 

Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, has deployed city cops to escort scabs across the picket lines. Nine days after the strike began, the Democratic Party-controlled Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) gave Marathon the go-ahead to run the refinery at “full capacity” of 150,000 barrels a day. The agency raised emission caps for the refinery even though surrounding neighborhoods already suffer from some of the worst cancer rates in the state. 

“There are times when we are walking into bad, bad, situations that we might not come out of,” one worker told White. “At least five times in my fifteen years here we’ve run into situations like fires.” Another worker added, “When there’s a fire we run into it, we don’t leave.”

White pointed to the September 2022 explosion at the BP Husky refinery near Toledo, Ohio, which took the lives of two brothers, Ben and Max Morrissey. “They were using contractors for the turnaround and rushing to get production back up as soon as possible,” White said. “They wanted to take advantage of the sharp rise in oil prices after the economy was restarted during the second year of the pandemic.”

The worker responded saying, “Well, you’re talking about BP, and that company has been bending the rules for decades. They ruined the whole industry.”

White responded, “But under capitalism, it’s not just a single CEO’s decision, it’s the imperative of the market. If a company cuts costs somewhere, in order for Marathon to stay competitive it has to reproduce the same conditions.”

“Yes!” the worker replied. “We were discussing this [in regard to Marathon’s refusal to budge on the contract], Marathon is one of the biggest oil companies in the US, so they’re the standard setter—they set the standard rate—so they could be backed by the whole oil industry.”

White replied, “Right! And the whole oil industry is backed by Wall Street. The ones who pulls the strings of every single company are the powerful shareholders and private equity firms like BlackRock.  They don’t care if they make their money on pork bellies or oil or currency speculation—they’re parasites who contribute nothing of value to society. But they have the power of life and death over the working class. And it’s not just your conditions here, they’re also pushing for these wars.” 

White noted that Vice President Dick Cheney had the maps of all the Iraqi oil fields before the US invasion in 2003. Now the vast resources of Iran and Russia were being targeted by US imperialism. “They want to deprive China of access to Mideast oil and get Europe hooked on US energy supplies—and they are willing to provoke World War III for this,” he said. 

Among the striking workers, who include some veterans of the wars against Iraq, there was ready agreement that the wars of the last four decades only benefited the corporations. “War lines a lot of politicians’ pockets too,” one striker commented.

Capitalism offered workers only two futures, White said, “a race to the bottom or to kill each other in war. That is why we’re fighting for socialism.” 

One of the workers challenged the SEP candidate saying, “It has never worked.” 

White asked him what he thought socialism meant, and the worker replied, “It’s all for one, everybody works as a community to better the whole community.” 

“That’s right,” White said, “but it is not a utopian dream. Socialism means internationalism, above all, and it corresponds to the actual development of modern society. The world economy is more interconnected than ever before. But capitalism divides the world into competing nations and prevents workers from cooperating with each other and using the world’s resources and technologies for the benefit of society. Workers need to tear down these obsolete boundaries and organize economic life for the world’s producers not the corporate-financial oligarchy.”

Referring to the efforts of Trump to incite violence against immigrants and Harris’ warmongering, the worker said, “They’ve got workers fighting against each other and it looks like war is coming, how are we going to get global socialism?”

White said the working class is an international class. “No matter what language you speak, you’re still exploited and part of the working class.” The SEP campaign, he said, was aimed at building a political movement of the working class to oppose both capitalist parties and fight for a workers’ government and socialism.

Far from fighting for the international unity of the working class, the union bureaucracies have sought to divide the working class for decades, White said. “If the corporations have a global strategy, why shouldn’t workers have a global strategy?”

The worker agreed with uniting workers worldwide but said it was an “extremely challenging proposition.” 

White said that American workers had been cut off from their own history, including the role of socialists in the formation of the mass industrial unions. This included the Trotskyist leaders of Teamsters Local 544 who led the Minneapolis General Strike in 1934. “The anti-socialist purges in the Teamsters, the UAW and other unions, is where the downfall of these organizations began.” 

In a discussion with another group of workers, White was asked what happened in the Soviet Union and how American workers could prevent the reemergence of a bureaucratic dictatorship if they took power in the US. White explained that the Stalinist bureaucracy arose from economic backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the first workers’ state in history. He discussed the fight by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition for socialist internationalism against the Stalinist “theory” of socialism in a single country. The restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy and the liquidation of the USSR, White said, was part of an international process that saw the collapse of all nationally based labor parties and unions in the face of capitalist globalization. 

The working class in the United States, White said, will not confront the immense economic challenges the Soviet workers did in 1917. The establishment of workers’ power in the US would be part of an unprecedented revolutionary upheaval around the world. Most of all, politically conscious and engaged working class would be the greatest guard against bureaucratic degeneration.

“We agree, we have capitalism run amok,” one striker said. Expressing his appreciation for the discussion, another striker told the SEP campaigners, “I love the discussion, no one else would come here to discuss this with us. I’ve learned a lot.”