Vol. 71/No. 30      August 20, 2007

She doesn’t live in Beirut or El Salvador but in Dakota City, Nebraska. She and the 2,450 members of Local 222 United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) on strike at Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) have learned what it’s like to come up against an army.

On July 27, Governor Charles Thone sent two National Guard units to Dakota City to supplement the 100 state troopers already there. This massive show of force amounts to a private army for IBP, the largest meat processing company in the country.

This strike… was forced by IBP when the company demanded that the workers accept a four-year wage freeze, a permanent end to all cost-of-living raises, reduction in pay for new hires, and other concessions.  
 
August 19, 1957
The civil rights bill, which had been amended to death in the Senate, now faces burial in the Rules Committee of the House of Representatives.

Republican strategists joined with the Dixiecrats and liberal Democrats to reduce the bill from a general civil rights measure to one concerned only with the right of Negroes to vote in the South.… Northern and Western Democrats vied with one another in making horse-trades with Senate Majority leader Lyndon Johnson, the man who arranged the “compromises” that killed the bill.

Ethel L. Payne in the Aug. 10 Chicago Defender, a leading Negro weekly…wrote:

“Shock-haired Jack Kennedy who is glassy-eyed from stargazing at 1960 toppled over like a ten pin… after his pal, Sen. George Smathers of Florida worked on him and Lyndon Johnson put a fatherly arm around his shoulder and recounted some of the political facts of life to him.”  
 
August 10, 1932
The Illinois miners’ struggle has sustained its first victim. Joe Colbert, president of Local 303, Orient, Illinois, was murdered in cold blood by Lewis-Walker gunmen firing from an automobile in front of his home. Joe Colbert was known as one of the staunchest militants. He held a long record of fight against the corrupt Lewis machine.

The Illinois coalfields are again seething with revolt spreading throughout the various sections and directed against the most brazen official treachery yet recorded. A powerful rank and file movement has sprung up…. Gigantic mass meetings have been held from which marchers are being organized to close down the mines which reopened under the operators’ reduced scale of wages.

Since April first, the Illinois miners have been on strike refusing to retreat from the basic wage scale of $6.10 per day formerly obtaining.  
 
 
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