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   Vol. 68/No. 14           April 13, 2004  
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
April 13, 1979
BALTIMORE—About sixty-five trade-union women and men attended a “Salute to Working Women” conference here March 31. Held at the United Steelworkers Local 2609 hall and sponsored by the local’s Women’s Advisory Committee, the conference focused on the relationship today—and historically—between the women’s movement and labor movement.

Sara Barron, a retired member of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, was particularly well qualified to speak on the history of working women. Barron was elected a union shop steward at the age of fourteen in 1916. In 1918 she marched in Washington to demand women’s suffrage. Later Barron helped organized the CIO.

“Our union stood for equal rights from the beginning,” Barron said. “But we had to educate the men.”

“Here is 1979,” she continued, “and I see all these women working in auto factories and steel mills. We should say to men, ‘You have gained from this.’”

Alice Camara, president of Baltimore National Organization for Women, spoke on the developing alliance between women and labor today.

“The concerns of the women’s movement are the concerns of the labor movement,” she said. “Eighty percent of women workers are underpaid, undervalued, and underemployed. Union women earn at least 40-70 percent more than non-union women, but only about 10 percent are organized.”  
 
April 12, 1954
Eisenhower and Dulles threaten to turn the Indo-China war into another Korea. They are talking in most belligerent language. American military personnel, disguised as “technicians,” are already aiding the French invaders in Indo-China. This country is supplying two-thirds of the money and arms to keep the invasion going. Wall Street would long ago have sent troops too, if the administration did not fear popular reaction, particularly after the demonstration of the people’s hostility toward the Korean intervention. “There is much fear we are being sucked into the Indo-China war,” wrote Scripps Howard foreign editor Ludwell Denny on April 5. He added: “Recognizing the lack of enthusiasm for its get-tough-in-Asia policy, the administration is now trying to convince Congressional leaders of the extreme seriousness of the Communist pressure in Indo-China.”

Serious for whom? Not the American, French or Indo-Chinese people. This war on the part of France is just naked imperialist grab, an invasion to steal the country from the Indo-Chinese. The Vietminh government was recognized by treaty back in 1946. The French tore up this treaty and treacherously attacked the Vietminh.

Thus, the Vietminh war for independence began years before the Mao regime took power in China. The Indo-Chinese people have the same right to take help from China, or anywhere else, to win their freedom that the American colonists had to take aid from Royalist France in our own revolutionary war of independence.  
 
 
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