Vol. 80/No. 41      October 31, 2016

 

25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

 

November 1, 1991

Members of the United Transportation Union in the Southern region of the Burlington Northern Railroad are voting on whether or not to modify our crew consist agreement. Consist agreements establish the number of workers required to switch or operate trains.

The railroad companies have been on a drive to cut back the work force. In the last ten years the number of railroad workers has been cut in half.

The BN proposal would cut the standard crew from an engineer, conductor, and two brakemen, to an engineer, conductor, and one brakeman. Crews on many freight trains would be reduced to an engineer and conductor only! Current rules requiring additional crew members on longer trains would be eliminated. All this adds up to smaller crews running larger trains further, contributing to increasingly unsafe working conditions.

October 31, 1966

During election campaigns, almost anything can happen when the capitalist politicians start slugging it out in the final weeks of the fight. “Revelations” about scandalous conditions both sides knew all about, did nothing about and even helped to perpetuate, make scare headlines. Take for example the current investigation into conditions in New York City’s 21 municipal hospitals.

These obsolete, rundown, under-manned, under-equipped old buildings have been used to take care of welfare cases and medically indigent sick people. And for years, while both Democrats and Republicans ran the city and state, the medical scandal in this city has grown more horrifying.

At Kings County, a doctor spent eight hours searching for a respirator for a desperately ill patient. Four patients died in that hospital last week for lack of life-saving equipment.

November 1, 1941

[President Franklin] Roosevelt’s blunt threat of repressive governmental action, including passage of anti-strike legislation, to drive the 53,000 striking workers of the steel corporations’ “captive” coal mines back to work, is more than a gun pointed at the individual, John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers (CIO).

It is a gun cocked, primed and aimed at the head of every worker in the United States.

Roosevelt’s demand for the strikers’ return to work is no mere appeal to “reason” or patriotism. It is an open notice, backed up by threat of all the repressive power of the capitalist state, that workers cannot strike.

Roosevelt is telling the American workers flatly that he is not interested in the merits of their demands, the justice of their cause, the intolerable level of their conditions.  
 
 
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