Vol. 75/No. 37      October 17, 2011

October 17, 1986
In the biggest strike ever by Black mine workers in South Africa, some 300,000 stayed away from their jobs October 1. They did so to protest a disastrous accident at Kinross goldmine that claimed the lives of 177 miners.

Marcel Golding, publicity secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said that this show of strength was “unparalleled in South African labor history.” The Chamber of Mines had proposed that the workers, rather than striking, observe a five-minute silence to commemorate the dead.

In some mines not a single Black worker went to work. In addition to the mine workers who struck—representing about half of all miners in the country—some 275,000 other workers also took part in the day of protest,.  
 
October 16, 1961
“It’s rough on anybody who is working to strike, but I’d rather be in a soup line than let the company walk over me,” commented one worker as he walked out of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant Oct. 3 in response to the strike call of the United Auto Workers Union. The strike—the first to hit the entire company since the UAW organized Ford in 1941—is dominated by the question of working conditions inside the plants. It is essentially a fight against Ford’s grueling speed-up system.

Two Ford locals organized large-scale mass picketing Oct. 9 to keep office workers from entering the River Rouge plant and the Lincoln-Mercury division headquarters. Local 600 officers said the action was to protest foremen doing union members’ work.  
 
December 19, 1936
On Aug. 15, 1936, sixteen men were arraigned by the Russian state prosecutor on charges of conspiring, together with the German Fascist Government and Leon Trotsky to assassinate the seven most prominent Soviet leaders, and of the actual murder of S.M. Kirov, another high Soviet official. Nine days later the trial had ended, the 16 were sentenced to die. In less than 24 hours the defendants were dead.

In that 10-day span, the names of old Bolsheviks implicated in [the] crime mounted until the total was almost a complete roll-call of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

Certainly no historian from extreme left to extreme right could deny that without these men the workers victory in Russia would have been impossible.  
 
 
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