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   Vol.65/No.39            October 15, 2001 
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
 
October 15, 1976
CLEVELAND--More than 100 steelworkers turned out here on Sunday afternoon, October 3, to meet and hear Ed Sadlowski, insurgent candidate for president of the United Steelworkers of America.

The crowd ranged from veterans of many years in the mills to young union activists, including some women. They came from about twenty different locals in the Cleveland area, USWA District 28.

Sadlowski, who is director of District 31 in Chicago, said he was running because neither incumbent president I.W. Abel nor his handpicked successor Lloyd McBride is "responsive to the membership."

"We have to get back to the basic concepts of what the trade-union movement is all about," Sadlowski said. "Not concerning itself with the profits of management, but addressing itself to the problems that confront the members, solving those problems, and creating new goals and new ideals to benefit the membership."

Sadlowski was interrupted by applause when he said that a six-hour workday was "long overdue" in order to "create employment and create more leisure time for workers."

The life-and-death issue of safety, he said, "is not a bargainable question. I've seen safety issues projected across the bargaining table and then be withdrawn in order to get another penny, another two pennies."

Instead, he stated, the union should insist on the "safety standards humanly and technologically possible, and then police those standards."

In response to other questions, Sadlowski said that both racism and red-baiting are incompatible with trade unionism. "That's the bosses' game," he said "That's the divide-and-conquer game."
 
October 15, 1951
Developments in Egypt, following hot on the heels of the British retreat from Iran, show that the Near East is boiling with revolt against continued imperialist domination.

The Egyptian government, acting under popular pressure, has denounced two treaties with Britain which it says it signed under "duress." One of them, signed in 1899, gives Britain control over the Egyptian Sudan, and the other, signed in 1936, holds the Suez Canal Zone under British military occupation.

These treaty abrogations, demanded by the whole Egyptian population, have been speeded by the powerlessness of British imperialism to cope with a similar situation in Iran, where the nationalist movement recently succeeded in expelling the British oil interests. Big demonstrations of Egyptians have hailed the government action with rejoicing.

Not only British, but French imperialism as well is feeling the blows of popular nationalism in the Near and Middle East. The North African territories of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria have witnessed a great growth of nationalist sentiment.

The British, together with the French and American imperialists, face an extremely difficult decision. If they try to resist the nationalist wave, they may face a full scale war against colonial uprisings in the Near East. This would cripple their efforts to assemble an alliance against the Soviet bloc of nations. If, on the other hand, they continue to retreat as the British did in Iran, they face the loss of a privileged military position, and the loss of colonial areas essential to their imperialist economy.

Thus the imperialists appear to face a growing Near East crisis comparable to the Far Eastern crisis that exploded with the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949.  
 
 
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