Vol. 81/No. 40      October 30, 2017

 

25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

 

October 30, 1992

“You’re fired!” That’s what British Coal plans to tell 30,000 mine workers in the next few months. And not only miners will be affected when the government-owned coal industry closes 31 pits by March 1993. Many thousands of mine-machinery manufacturing workers and rail workers will be hit hard. Mining communities across Britain will be devastated.

The decision made by British Coal, without regard to the effects on miners, their families, and mining communities, is the same decision capitalist enterprises and the governments that represent them are making around the world. The capitalist system is in crisis and the only answer for the wealthy class that benefits from the exploitation of labor is to attack our living standards and lead us into war.

October 30, 1967

NEW YORK — Brooklyn College students at an outdoor rally of 3,000 Oct. 23 voted to reject proposals by the school administration to end their five-day-old strike. The students adopted a far-reaching series of demands which included the suspension of four administration officials suspected of calling police to break up a student antiwar demonstration.

The strike began when a protest at a Navy recruiting table in Boylan Hall was brutally assaulted by police Oct. 19. Sixty students and three professors were arrested and many were injured. Infuriated students demanded that charges be dropped against those arrested and declared the strike to enforce their demands. They put forward sweeping proposals for student control of the campus. The strike has been 80 percent effective.

October 31, 1942

A general strike of the workers of the textile city of Ahmedabad, where some 27 percent of India’s textile mills are concentrated, is still going on after ten weeks. The strike, a political one in protest against the arrest of the All-India Congress leaders, began on August 9, the day they were jailed by the British authorities.

This strike is a significant indication that India’s struggle for independence goes on unabated. An earlier Herald-Tribune dispatch gave the following details: “Thousands of spinners, weavers and other millhands on strike have left the city to return to their native villages.”

The workers with considerable experience of political and trade union struggle, on returning to the villages become leaders in arousing the peasants to refuse to pay rents and taxes.  
 
 
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