October 6, 1997
SACRAMENTO, California — Shouting “¡Sí, se puede!” and “Justice! Now!” more than 1,000 farm workers and janitors, along with other unionists, students, and community activists, marched through this state capital September 18, led by the United Farm Workers union. They came to press for the right of farm workers and janitors to organize into unions free from intimidation by the bosses and the police.
There have been many marches and rallies this year to back the UFW campaign to organize the 20,000 strawberry workers in California. “I’m here to support the struggles of the working class and poor,” student Teresa Rodríguez said. “People see the numbers out here. They try and ignore you, but people working here could see us.” Rodríguez also took note of the recent strike victories against United Parcel Service and the Bay Area Rapid Transit.
October 6, 1972
There are rumors in the media that private talks between [Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives have resulted in some sort of agreement regarding the Vietnam war. Any such agreement constitutes a violation of the right of the Vietnamese to self-determination. The only right the U.S. has in Vietnam is to get out, immediately and unconditionally!
The April offensive of the Vietnamese liberation forces has again confirmed that the Saigon regime and its army are creatures of the U.S. with no significant backing among the Vietnamese people. The horrendous U.S. air war continues.
Forceful, visible actions by antiwar forces this fall can help draw public attention to the slaughter that continues in Vietnam and repudiate the U.S. rulers’ attempts to negotiate the future of Vietnam.
October 6, 1947
Under the iron hand of the Kremlin bureaucracy, strikes or other demonstrations of the working class are ruthlessly suppressed. Any strike in the Soviet Union or Moscow-occupied territories is thus of unusual significance, indicating as it does heroic resistance to the Stalinist terror.
Such a strike was reported Sept. 25. At Lodz, Poland, 40,000 textile workers, three-fourths of them women, began a strike Sept. 15 against a government-introduced Stakhanovite speed-up system in Polish industry.
This system — stubbornly resisted for years by Russian workers — takes the speed record of an especially skilled worker clocked for a short period to whip the workers of an entire plant or industry to frenzied effort to achieve similar records. The strike of the workers is a protest against the introduction of the vicious Stakhanovite system in Poland.