Vol. 72/No. 16      April 21, 2008

The conference, which is sponsored by the Coal Employment Project (CEP), is to be held June 24-26.

CEP was formed in 1977 to help women get and keep coal mining jobs.

Michele Miller, CEP Pennsylvania representative and financial secretary of UMWA Local 1197, told reporters that women still make up less than 3 percent of the coal industry’s workforce. And, as a result of the economic crisis, 41 percent of these women are laid off, she said.  
 
April 21, 1958
Government figures released two days ago show that the present recession is the deepest since World War II, which pulled the capitalist economy out of the great depression. In March, total national production had dropped 17 index points or 11.7 percent below what it was in August when the recession began.

In Michigan 1,000 a day are being dropped from the unemployment insurance rolls because they have exhausted their benefits.

Federal action to extend the period of unemployment benefits is being given the slow treatment in Congress. In Michigan 4,000 unemployed unionists went to Lansing on April 8 to demand action on the jobless compensation law.
 
April 15, 1933
Tens of thousands of American boys are being herded into regular army camps, presumably for forestry training. The 1,800 supposedly homeless youths from New York who boarded the buses for Fort Slocum are the first victims of a novel brand of efficiency known as the “New Deal.” The “investigators” of the New York Home Relief Bureau of the Department of Public Welfare are instructed to supply 7,500 unmarried young men between the ages of 18 and 23 from off the relief list. Do the men actually receive the $30 per month that they are promised? Not at all. $25 of every $30 earned by the worker is to be deducted and turned over to the Home Relief Bureau which promptly deducts that amount from the family budget, plus $1.50 per week from the food budget.  
 
 
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