Actions like the May 3 protest, uniting a wide range of organizations and involving participants from all walks of life, have a powerful effect on the working class. They reinforce and extend the antidraft, antiwar sentiment that already runs strong among millions of union members. Public employees, auto workers, electrical workers, and other unionists joined the May 3 march.

The widespread protests have also helped inspire the formation of labor committees on El Salvador in San Jose and New York. Speakers from the Revolutionary Democratic Front of El Salvador have appeared before dozens of union meetings.  
 
May 21, 1956
The growing crisis in the auto and farm equipment industry was dramatized last week by a one day shutdown of all General Motors assembly plants in the country. This is the first time since the economic recession preceding the Korean war that the biggest producer in the auto industry closed all its assembly plants for a one day production “holiday”—without pay.

The UAW [United Auto Workers] finds itself tied up with a long term three-year agreement that does not expire until 1958. From the far west in California to the eastern seaboard in New Jersey, Southgate Local 216 and Linden Local 595, have called upon the UAW International Executive Board to invoke the principle of the “living agreement,” and negotiate a new contract.

In each case, placed at the head of the list, is the demand for a 30-hour week at 40-hours pay.  
 
May 15, 1931
The City Government [in Minneapolis] has been seized by a fit of Red hysteria and for some time has been prohibiting and breaking up all kinds of radical meetings. The Stalinists have virtually accepted the situation as a proof that the capitalists are against the workers and that the city officials are tools of the capitalists. Thus, they prove that there is no free speech, which they consider a point in their favor—and there are no public meetings of the party.

The Left Oppositionists have a different idea. In view of the fact that the capitalist government professes to guarantee these rights, and that the masses of workers who are in no way connected with the Communists ardently believe in them, they decided to test the issue in a fight for free speech. To that unique idea they added another: That a wide movement should be set in motion on this issue.  
 
 
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