The five-to-two ruling is one of the most significant civil rights decisions since the one on school desegregation twenty-five years ago.

Weber, a white lab technician at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Gramercy, Louisiana, had charged that the affirmative-action training plan at his plant constituted “reverse discrimination” against white male workers.

Under the plan, which had been negotiated by the United Steelworkers as part of its 1974 contract with Kaiser, half of the openings in a craft training program were to be filled by Black and women workers.

Last year the same court ruled in favor of Allan Bakke, throwing out affirmative-action admission programs in higher education. The decisive difference this time around was the broad opposition to Weber by the labor movement. The AFL-CIO and most major unions backed the United Steelworkers’ defense of the affirmative-action plan.

That is the real significance of this ruling. It can spur the labor movement to fight on a new scale for goals, quotas, and meaningful affirmative-action plans to help counter centuries of discrimination and to strengthen the unions.  
 
July 5, 1954
The State Department’s use of force and violence to overthrow the legally elected government of Guatemala found few defenders anywhere. Throughout Latin America, masses of students and workers staged bitter protest demonstrations. As a result, the general opinion among press correspondents was that “No matter what happens in Guatemala, the United States is the loser.”

The only voices to speak out in support of U.S. policies were landlords, peanut dictators and upper-class grafters who feed directly at the Washington trough. The oppressive regimes of Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, etc, in answer to the bidding of the State Department played their roles in the United Nations and elsewhere but they did not represent their peoples’ sentiments.

Students of Havana staged a public mass meeting which was broken up by the police. After many of the demonstrators were arrested, workers and students of Havana stoned the offices of the United Press and the North American Electric Company.

The Chilean Central Labor Union of Santiago called a nation-wide one-hour work stoppage to protest United States intervention in Guatemala. Chilean newspapers supporting U.S. policy were stoned by demonstrators and the Chilean Chamber of Deputies voted 34 to 15 to condemn the invasion as “aggression.”  
 
 
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