Vol. 77/No. 26 July 8, 2013
July 8, 1988
PORTLAND, Ore. — Some 6,700 Pacific Northwest lumber workers are on strike against five forest products companies, fighting to regain wages and benefits taken from them in 1986.The strikers are members of the International Woodworkers of America and the Western Council of Industrial Workers.
Many strikers pointed out that they will never get back the wages lost over the last two years. But, they added, they are prepared to stay out until they get a contract with wages and benefits restored to 1986 levels. The Women’s Hardship Auxiliary on Mills has organized a food collection and gone to local businesses to get donations.
Contract discussions continue with other forest product companies, including Weyerhaeuser, where 6,000 union members work. A total of 38,000 workers are affected by these negotiations. Most of their contracts expired June 1.
July 10, 1963
DENVER — At midnight June 16, workers at the Denver plant of the Gates Rubber Co. went on strike.The strike was called by a vote of 2,385 to 130, in opposition to company demands for a two-year contract which would not go into effect while contracts at any of Gates’ other eight plants are being negotiated.
The strikers also seek to block management efforts to introduce a wage scale based on piece work and to stop a plan whereby several men could be replaced by one man during slack seasons.
The Gates Co., sixth largest manufacturer of rubber goods in the U.S., is run as a family preserve. President Charles C. Gates Jr. commented on the present strike: “Wages, work rules, factory conditions, contracts — all of these are really management’s business.”
One worker, asked when he thought the strike would end, replied: “When the company comes across!”
July 9, 1938
The American Association for Social Security has analyzed the results of the first quarter of New Deal liberalism’s unemployment and old age insurance, January 1 to March 31, 1938, and found that its program in this field is anti-social and in every conceivable aspect worse than home relief.The only “success” that can be registered is the issuance of 38,000,000 social security numbers by a newly-created, superfluous bureaucracy of 13,890 employees in 19 states (which is five times more per insured person than has been found necessary in capitalist Britain) and the collection by the United States Treasury of $577,450,100 as compared with $2,935,829 paid to the lump-sum recipients of old age benefits.
The average cumulative payment to 114,927 persons who had reached the age of 65, and to the estates of those who died, was but $29.80 after 15 months of contribution payments.
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