June 14, 1999
President William Clinton and NATO commanders are continuing their brutal assault on the working class of Yugoslavia. We urge our readers to join in actions demanding an immediate halt to the bombing and the removal of all U.S. and NATO troops from the Balkans.
The imperialist rulers hope to erase the gains of the Yugoslav revolution, to wipe it from the memory of working people in the Balkans and reimpose capitalist rule. The Yugoslavia the imperialists want to cut apart was forged in the 1942-45 revolution, brought to victory by the Partisan movement.
Workers and peasants of all nationalities united in this struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. Working people then turned the victory against the Nazis into a social revolution that abolished capitalist property relations and established a workers state.
June 14, 1974
NEW YORK — The skyrocketing cost of living is the main reason 110,000 members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers went on strike June 1 in the union’s first industry-wide walkout since 1921. The biggest concentrations of strikers are in New York City and Philadelphia; there are also significant numbers in Illinois, Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky and New Jersey.
“We didn’t necessarily want to go out now,” said a striker. “But we just can’t make a living any more. Our last three-year raise was eaten up the first year after the contract was settled.”
An escalator clause is important, one worker said, so that they don’t just keep losing every raise to inflation. New York City transit workers won an escalator clause earlier and the demand is being taken up by ever wider sections of the union movement. Pensions, too, are grossly inadequate.
June 13, 1949
Ohio’s unemployed workers will be denied unemployment insurance unless they sign a “loyalty” oath swearing they do not “advocate” the overthrow of the government nor belong to any organization that does. The law is particularly vicious because it uses the direct threat of starvation to impose thought-control.
There has been a flood of bills introduced or passed in state legislatures requiring “loyalty” oaths not only of state employees, but of public school teachers, college professors, lawyers and even workers in private industry engaged on “government contracts.” The hunt for “heretics” is sweeping the colleges and universities.
The rulers are proceeding with their drive to crush free thought as a necessary preliminary to the eventual third world war they are planning. The defense of civil rights must be pressed more vigorously than ever.