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   Vol. 69/No. 32           August 22, 2005  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
August 29, 1980
Poland’s biggest strike wave in a decade has rocked the government of President Edward Gierek. Tens of thousands of workers have shut down some 170 factories in the Baltic Sea port cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot. The driving force in the struggle are the 17,000 workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, who have taken over the yard and turned it into an organizing center for the struggle.

Strikes are also reported in other parts of Poland, part of a tide of protest that began welling up on July 1 when the government imposed a sharp increase in meat prices.

Their demands initially centered on a $66 a month wage increase to match price rises and recognition of their right to form a union independent of the Gierek government. But the demands have expanded to include a wide range of democratic and economic rights.  
 
August 22, 1955
YOUNGSTOWN, Aug. 15—The fight that broke out over filling the post of vice-president of the Steelworkers Union is increasing in intensity. Now the staff men, mostly those who are supporting Joseph P. Moloney, the opponent of the Steelworker’s Union President David J. McDonald’s choice, are organizing a union within the union—an organization that would give job security to the staff men.

Because this is a power struggle within the bureaucracy, it is inevitable that one section of the machine will threaten those who are challenging them for power.

In contrast to this, the workers have shown little interest in the election campaign. Neither side has indicated that it has a program to meet the problems that will be confronting the steelworkers.  
 
September 1, 1930
The constant struggle between British and North American financial interests is clearly discernable in the present military revolt in Peru. Following close on the heels of the fall of the Siles dictatorship in Bolivia, Augusto B. Leguia, dictator of Peru, has been forced to resign the government of that country into the hands of a military committee.

For eleven years, Leguia has served Wall Street well as its Peruvian “viceroy,” being ever ready to support the American imperialist interest against their British rivals as well as against the masses of native peons and workers. Consequently the prisons are filled with political prisoners ranging from the liberal bourgeois elements around Haya de la Torre in the A.P.R.A., which under the veil of the anti-imperialist struggle covers up its services to British capitalism, to the workers’ and peasants’ leaders who have dared to organize the masses against the imperialist exploitation.  
 
 
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