Jerry White (socialist)
Jerome "Jerry" White (born 1959) is an American politician and journalist, and is the Labor Editor reporting for the World Socialist Web Site. He is a member of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, and was a member of its predecessor the Workers League, joining the movement in 1979.[1] White was the SEP's nominee for the United States presidential elections four times, running in 1996, 2008, 2012 and 2016.[2][3]
In February 2024, SEP National Chairman David North announced White would run in the 2024 US election as the party's candidate for vice-president. His running mate, for president, is Joseph Kishore.[4]
Early life[edit]
Jerome White was raised in a working-class family in Queens, New York. In 1979, while working at United Parcel Service and attending the City University of New York, he joined the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party.[5]
Career[edit]
As a member of the Workers League, White reported on the 10-week strike by Appalachian coal miners in early 1981 and the Solidarity Day march on September 19, 1981, in Washington, DC where half a million workers protested President Reagan’s firing of 11,000 striking PATCO air traffic controllers and the smashing of their union. He has been active in the party’s interventions in the working class since the 1980s, providing on-the-spot reporting of strikes at Greyhound Bus, Hormel, Eastern Airlines, Pittston Coal, Caterpillar, Verizon, UPS, public schools in Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, West Virginia and Oklahoma, the oil refineries and many others.
White authored a book, published in 1990, entitled Death on the Picket Line: The Story of John McCoy. The book, an investigative report, treats the killing of a militant coal miner, McCoy, as well as the history of the United Mine Workers (UMW) in West Virginia.[6] He has written extensively on the history of the American working class, including the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike and Flint Sit-downs in 1936-37.
White has served as the labor editor of the World Socialist Web Site since its founding in 1998. As a WSWS reporter, White has written extensively on the US auto industry,[7][8] and has interviewed autoworkers in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.[9][10][11][12]
White is also the Editor of the World Socialist Web Site Autoworkers Newsletter.[13] White announced the creation of the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter in July 2015, as a means to oppose "UAW Nationalism", pension cuts, poverty wages, and unemployment, and to call for the abolishment of the two-tier wage system, and develop international unity among autoworkers.[14] The Autoworkers Newsletter played a substantial role in the "No vote" carried out by Fiat Chrysler workers and Nexteer workers in 2015 against the proposed contract.[15]
The newsletter and the WSWS played a central role in rallying support for GM workers in Silao, Mexico who were fired in 2019 for refusing to work overtime during strike by GM workers in the US and encouraging workers to shut down the auto industry protect autoworkers from the spread of COVID-19 in March 2020.[16][17] The Autoworker Newsletter supported Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman who ran as a socialist candidate for United Auto Workers president in 2022 and Lehman’s lawsuit opposing the disenfranchisement of UAW members.[18][19]
In 2023, White interviewed autoworkers and commented extensively on UAW President Shawn Fain’s impotent “stand up strike” and the UAW labor agreements, which have opened the door for massive job cuts in the global auto industry. White denounced Fain’s endorsement of US President Biden, writing a comment titled, “The UAW apparatus backed the war criminal in the White House.”[20]
During his early years in the Workers League, White also served as editor of its youth newspaper, the Young Socialist, and interviewed Gary Tyler in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana in 1985. In 1974, the 16-year-old black youth was arrested and falsely accused of murder in a state conspiracy backed by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. In 2016, Gary was released after serving 42 years in prison, including many on death row, and recently reconnected with several party members who campaigned for his freedom, including White, during an exhibit of his artwork in Detroit.
White was active in the 1993 Citizens Inquiry into the Mack Avenue Fire, which opposed the witch hunt of the parents of seven children killed in a Detroit house fire that occurred after the city and electric company shut off utilities to the impoverished family.[21][22] White was also active in Detroit's Committee Against Utility Shutoffs (CAUS) and organized hearings on fires in low-income neighborhoods.[23][24]
In October 2013, White participated in the Socialist Equality Party’s protest against the threatened sale of artwork at the Detroit Institute of Arts and gave introductory report to the Workers Inquiry into the Bankruptcy of Detroit and the Attack on the DIA & Pensions on February 15, 2014.[25][26]
On January 24, 2021, White was invited to speak on the Jimmy Dore Show to discuss the strike by Hunts Point produce workers in New York City. The YouTube personality brought White on without informing him that Dore’s previous guest was a member of the Boogaloo Boys, an armed far-right militia group that actively participated in Trump’s January 6 coup attempt and the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.[27]
White began by saying the Socialist Equality Party opposes Dore’s strategy and “the idea that somehow there can be unity of left and right.” He continued, “There is a historical precedent. The Nazis called themselves ‘revolutionists’ and opponents of the international Jewish capitalist conspiracy. This has nothing to do with left politics. My movement, the Socialist Equality Party, is seeking to build a genuine movement of the working class. We are above all internationalists. The right wing promotes nationalism.”[28]