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Vol. 79/No. 39      November 2, 2015

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

November 2, 1990

SUVA, Fiji — Some 400 garment workers struck the Just Cham Garment Company at Nausori, a small town several miles outside Fiji’s capital, protesting starvation wages and sweatshop conditions.

Strikers were averaging US$14 for a 40-hour week. Because of illegal deductions by their employers, some take home less than $10 a week. The workers, all women, are also denied lunch and other breaks, forced to work Saturdays unpaid, and subjected to sexual harassment from management, such as strip searches, allegedly to look for stolen garments.

The garment workers are organized by the Fiji Association of Garment Workers. This is the latest in a series of strikes by garment workers seeking to narrow their wage gap with other Fijian workers.

November 1, 1965

Cuba continues to firmly press its revolutionary foreign policy. This is apparent from the speech delivered by Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa to the General Assembly of the United Nations on Oct. 15.

Indicting U.S. aggression, the Cuban spokesman declared:

“It is they who brutally attack the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. … They supply weapons and money to check the emancipation of the subject peoples of Angola, Mozambique and so-called Portuguese Guinea. It is they who indirectly bomb Laos, who threaten the independence of Cambodia, who undermine the sovereignty of Cyprus, who oppose the restoration of the legitimate rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations, who indirectly or directly organize individual or collective invasions against Cuba.”

November 2, 1940

The shift of the main theater of war to the Mediterranean signifies the beginning of a new phase in the titanic world struggle between British and German imperialism.

Hitler has apparently abandoned for the present any attempt to crush Britain by direct assault, invasion of the British Isles. He is moving instead to isolate the British completely from the European continent and from the Near and Middle Eastern units of its empire.

To do this he has to make the Mediterranean an Axis lake. This is the ultimate objective of the drive begun by Italian forces against Greece early last Monday morning.

From the standpoint of the war in general, the Mediterranean offensive of the Axis opens what is certain to be a lengthy and costly struggle.  
 
 
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