Vol. 81/No. 44      November 27, 2017

 

25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

 
November 27, 1992
NEW YORK — Workers at the STC Knitting Inc./Maxion Manufacturing Corp.’s sweater factory in Queens began a strike shortly after the Immigration and Naturalization Service raided the plant October 22 and arrested 10 workers. The owner of STC, Bill Mok, called the INS in response to the successful organizing drive by the workers, who in September voted 36-10 to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Local 155.

Strikers explain in a fact sheet that the INS raid was only the most recent attack by the company. In May the owner took away vacation and holiday pay and medical insurance. He imposed a 49-hour workweek with no overtime pay. In June, after workers began the union-organizing campaign, the six members of the organizing committee were fired. All won their jobs back.

November 27, 1967
PHILADELPHIA — Nov. 17 may well have been the most significant day in the recent history of the Afro-American struggle here. At 10 a.m. over five thousand Black students at a dozen Philadelphia high schools marched out of their classrooms and began to converge on the board of education headquarters. They were demanding Black control of the ghetto schools.

Two hours later their peaceful rally was turned into a bloodbath as hundreds of club-swinging police charged in and indiscriminately smashed heads. Fifty-seven students were arrested, most of them under 18 years old; many of the arrested had been brutally beaten, and most were denied hospital treatment while in police custody. Injured who had not been arrested were left lying on the ground at the scene of the police rampage.

November 28, 1942
During the same week that the American authorities clasped hands with the French Quisling, Darlan, in Africa and sought collaboration with the Fascist Franco in Spain, here in the United States they took the first steps to suppress a bona-fide anti-fascist workers’ paper — The Militant.

Post Office authorities have struck at the mailing rights of The Militant without even specifying which article or editorials are objected to.

To cap these crimes, news of these suppressions has itself been suppressed. The managers of the paper were not notified of the suppressions and were informed of them only after they had inquired concerning the non-delivery of the paper. None of the big capitalist papers has published reports of this blow against the freedom of the press.  
 
 
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