Workers face high prices, inadequate schools, not enough good-paying jobs and unaffordable housing. The pandemic exposed a broken health care system that allowed corporations to make fortunes while we got sick and died.
Maryland is a rich state. But the wealth working people create doesn’t go to them. Huge military contractors like Northrop Grumman, Westinghouse, and Lockheed Martin produce weapons systems here, making hundreds of billions in profit. Like other corporations, they pay much lower tax rates than ordinary working people pay. Real estate developers get special tax breaks, whether at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor or at UnderArmour’s new complex near I-95. The water and sewer systems for Baltimore City and County and for WSSC outside Washington, D.C. have not been maintained despite all the fees we pay, even while sewage seeps into homes and pollutes the Patapsco and Potomac Rivers. While agricultural companies on the Eastern Shore like Perdue pay lousy wages for hard, dangerous work, the state ignores the health problems and the pollution they cause.
Despite all these problems they created, the two big parties dare to ask for our votes again. The Working Class Party says, No. Working people can do better than this. Working people can take things in our own hands, organize a fight that begins to tackle the problems we face.
Trying to cover up what they have done, the politicians try to set us against each other, using racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant lies.
A vote for Working Class Party is a way to affirm, NO, we will stand together to confront the bosses and the politicians who serve them. Joining together, women and men, black and white, born here and born elsewhere, we can fight for a better life for everyone.
The two Working Class Party candidates in the November 2022 Maryland elections are workers who helped gather the signatures needed to have this party recognized in Maryland. They are workers who have been active in their own workplaces.
David Harding is our candidate for governor. He has lived and worked in Baltimore for many decades, as a steelworker, shipyard worker, and as a computer operator for the Maryland Department of Health. He has been active in the unions where he worked.
Cathy White is our candidate for lieutenant governor. She has worked in many different jobs, babysitting and cleaning other people’s homes, working in a pizza joint, a pet hotel, a nursing home, and a warehouse. She has worked at a photofinishing factory for the last 35 years.
They know what it means to work, to barely scrape by because wages don’t cover what we need just to live. But they also have seen how much their own class is able to do when it organizes together.