The general strike, which would be the first one in Britain since 1926, was called at an emergency meeting of the Trades Union Congress in London March 5.

That meeting took place as tens of thousands of British workers escalated anti-inflation strikes across the country.

It also coincides with the closing of world foreign exchange markets in a renewed crisis of the international monetary system. The British strikes and the turbulence of the world monetary system are intimately connected.

Prime Minister Edward Heath has imposed a wage-control program in England to strengthen the pound and bolster British competition in world finance. As in the United States, wages are controlled but food prices are spiraling.

In the past two weeks the anger of British workers has exploded in massive protests. A London correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor wrote that "Britain faces perhaps its gravest industrial crisis in 47 years."

The strikers include:

Gas workers, who have stopped production at hundreds of factories.

Nearly 250,000 government workers.

Locomotive engineers struck the following day bringing the whole railroad system to a standstill.

London teachers are striking in three-day waves.

220,000 hospital workers have struck at well over 200 hospitals.

March 15, 1948
America's most powerful corporations, their coffers bursting with profits and their prices hitting the stratosphere, are adopting an arrogant "get tough" policy toward CIO demands for third-round wage increases.

General Electric, [the] biggest corporation in the electrical goods industry, on March 3 opened negotiations with the CIO United Electrical Workers by formally announcing it would grant no wage boosts. GE which made $1 profit for every $3 of its net worth in 1947, said any wage increases would be "inflationary."

A similar hard-boiled stand is being taken by the meat- packing trust, whose prices have gone up several hundred percent since 1939. The "Big Four" of the meat industry -Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy - have turned thumbs down on CIO Packinghouse Workers' demands, already reduced by union officials from an original request for a 29-cent an hour raise to 19 cents.

After two months of fruitless negotiations, some 100,000 CIO packinghouse workers are scheduled to go on strike throughout the country on March 16.

Now the steel moguls - falsely rumored as ready to raise wages on the basis of their monumental profits and a new price boost - have swung an ax on the wage aspirations of the CIO steel workers a month in advance of negotiations.  
 
 
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