September 18, 1970
SALINAS, Calif., Sept. 7 - The Salinas Valley, beginning at Monterey Bay and stretching southward for over 50 miles, produces a major portion of the entire country's lettuce, tomatoes, celery, artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower, beans and strawberries. In America's "salad bowl," five companies control 90 percent of the farmland.
Over the last two years the predominantly Chicano workers have followed the development of the Delano grape strike. This spring they began to organize themselves. Their representatives made a trip to Delano and asked the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) to come to the valley. By the end of July, to keep UFWOC out, farm growers signed a sweetheart contract with the Teamsters union.
The five-year contract provided little more than the minimum wage. The workers were summoned to an owner's house where he explained that the union official would come around the following week to sign them up. Anyone who did not sign could no longer work.
The UFWOC responded by taking both the growers and the Teamsters to court, charging that the field workers had been denied the right to choose their own union. When a grower tried to fire 250 workers who refused to join the Teamsters, the UFWOC threw up a picket line. Growers and Teamsters obtained a court order against picketing, but the line continued. Packinghouse workers honored the strike, and the lettuce crop lay rotting in the fields.
September 8, 1945 ST. LOUIS, Aug. 21 - The AFL newspaper carriers have completely paralyzed the three capitalist dailies here, the Post Dispatch, Star-Times and Globe-Democrat, by a militant strike which began August 16. The end is not yet in sight.
Because union pressmen, in complete solidarity with the carriers, have refused to go through the picket lines, the publishers have been unable even to print papers, let alone to get them distributed! Both the carriers and the pressmen belong to the International Typographical Union.
St. Louis is literally without newspapers and seems to be bearing up under the "ordeal" manfully. It is this cold, passive indifference by the overwhelming portion of the people that has the publishers frightened. Deprive this city for three months of the scandal sheets (so-called "news" papers) and a large part of it might be weaned away for good.
St. Louis carriers are striking mainly to compel this recognition of bargaining rights by the bosses. Collective bargaining however is no empty abstraction with the workers and their demand denotes a large number of grievances in the background. If they win - and we think they will - new struggles will develop rapidly on more concrete and specific issues.