Vol. 76/No. 28 July 30, 2012
July 31, 1987
The United States Court of Appeals has ordered Trans World Airlines to reinstate 1,500 former strikers who are members of the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants.After taking over the reins of TWA in 1985, corporate raider Carl Icahn demanded that most unions at the airline take a 15 percent pay cut. But he told the IFFA membership, which is 85 percent female, to take a 44 percent wage and benefit cut.
He said the additional cut was necessary since “you girls aren’t breadwinners” and that we were only working for “second [family] incomes.”
IFFA went on strike to resist Icahn’s demands. Icahn hired replacement workers. The six-week strike ended in May 1986 when IFFA made an “unconditional offer” to return to work.
July 30, 1962
Medicare has been a political football ever since Aime Forand introduced a comprehensive medical care plan for Social Security pensioners in 1957.That bill finally died in the House Rules Committee in 1959.
Kennedy made Medicare one of his campaign promises. The King-Anderson Bill, a paler version of the Forand measure, was introduced in January 1961 and has been kept in a pigeon-hole in the House Ways and Means Committee ever since.
The only people who are not happy with the latest defeat are some 17 million retired persons, who need that care, and their children, who face the hard choice of dumping their aged parents on the unloving arms of charity or mortgaging their own and their children’s future.
May 1, 1937
HOUSTON—The drive to organize the $14 billion oil industry is gaining momentum throughout the country, particularly in the three centers: Killgore, Texas, the center of the world’s largest oil field; in Oklahoma City, capital of the middle west oil industry; and in the Houston, Port Arthur and Beaumont district, the world’s largest refining and distribution center.At the same time the oil companies have been announcing wage increases with a big share of publicity. The oil companies, not sure that the wage increases will stop organization, are trying to pep up company unions and all kinds of vicious propaganda is being issued against the CIO.
The whole labor movement throughout Texas and the Southwest has been stimulated as a result of the drive to organize the oil workers.
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