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Vol. 76/No. 43      November 26, 2012

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago
 

November 27, 1987

SHERIDAN, Wyo.—The battle between striking United Mine Workers of America members and coal bosses Peter Kiewit & Sons and Nerco Coal is escalating here.

Some 240 UMWA Local 1972 members have been on strike at the Decker Coal Co. strip mine, which is just across the state line in Montana, since early October. The 44 members of UMWA Local 2055 who work at Big Horn Coal Co.’s mine near Sheridan went out a few days later.

The strikes have been a real battle from the beginning. The coal bosses, courts, and area cops are trying to break the strike—and if possible, the union—by bringing in scabs.

The miners and their supporters have responded by organizing a series of peaceful sit-down blockades on the roads into the mines to prevent the of scabs from getting through.

November 26, 1962

NEW YORK—The FBI round-up of Cubans here on charges of conspiring to commit sabotage is a deliberate hoax designed to deepen anti-Cuban hysteria.

The witch-hunting character of the Justice Department move is apparent from the few hard facts that can be sifted from the screaming headlines and lurid stories of plans to destroy department stores and oil refineries in the New York area and to unleash a reign of terror in the city.

In the nearly four years since the Cuban Revolution, there has not been a single act of sabotage committed or even charged in this country. But the U.S. government has been indisputably linked to the very kind of sabotage in Cuba it now charges against those arrested here. Saboteurs didn’t simply “conspire” to plant incendiary bombs in Cuban department stores. They actually burned down Havana’s biggest store.

November 27, 1937

All indications in the national scene point to a wholesale offensive against the living standards of the American workers, both in the industrial as well as in the political field. The past week has witnessed a further sharp drop in employment figures, organized threats on the part of the bosses against the incipient resistance of the workers to this trend and a marked tendency on the part of Congress and the administration to act more openly as the direct agency of the capitalists in their efforts to unload the burden of the onrushing depression upon labor’s shoulders.

Linked up with this strategy follows an onslaught on the gains made by the trade unions in the past period. That is why the bosses are especially alarmed at the militancy of the auto workers in Michigan and the rubber workers in Ohio, who have begun to reply to the layoff campaign with sit-down strikes.  
 
 
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