June 7, 1999
PASCAGOULA, Miss. — “Good news to Newport News, Ingalls workers want money too!” declares a picket sign at the main gate of Ingalls Shipbuilding in this Gulf Coast town. With 11,500 workers, it’s Mississippi’s largest private employer. Eight thousand workers are on strike. This is the second major shipyard strike in the U.S. Members of United Steelworkers of America Local 8888 at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia have been on strike since April 5.
The Ingalls workers rejected a proposal that included wage increases along with increases in health insurance premiums and co-payments. Strikers haven’t had a raise in six years. This is the first strike at Ingalls since 1974.
Strikers are aware of the Newport News strike and the fight to win union recognition at Avondale shipyard in New Orleans.
June 7, 1974
The mass rebellion in Portugal continues to deepen. On May 21 hundreds of African workers and students demonstrated in Lisbon for immediate independence for Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands. On May 25 another demonstration was held, involving Portuguese youth, soldiers, and sailors, as well as Africans, demanding an immediate end to Portugal’s African wars of aggression. The action was estimated as 5,000-strong.
Portuguese workers continue to exercise their newly won right to strike in an effort to win wage increases to catch up with the skyrocketing cost of living. As of May 20 there were at least 60,000 industrial workers on strike. In addition, 200,000 textile workers have been on strike for two weeks. The 8,000 workers at the Lisnave shipyards ended their strike last week in return for a minimum wage of $280 a month.
June 6, 1949
In recent months Stalinist Russia has given vent to the most outspoken expression of anti-Semitism yet witnessed there. The controlled press has been railing against “homeless cosmopolitans” — and “passportless wanderers” — old anti-Semitic euphemisms for Jews.
These attacks have been underscored with adding the original Jewish name in parenthesis to the assumed Russian name of each of their subjects. Thus, the critics “Melnikov (Mehlman) … Yakovlev (Holtzman)” etc., are denounced as “homeless cosmopolitans”; the sport writers “Yasny (Finkelstein), Vietoroff (Zlochevsky), Svetloff (Scheidlin),” etc., are condemned as “passportless wanderers” and so on.
Stalinist anti-Semitism, like barbarism in all its manifestations, can be defeated only by consistent struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the working class in a Socialist world.