July 12, 1999
NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia — “We must let them know that they can’t walk all over us any old way. What we do will make a difference to the other companies.” This is how Glenda Saunders, a pipefitter at the Newport News shipyard and a member of United Steelworkers of America Local 8888, summed up her view of the strike battle here.
After two and a half months on the picket lines, the big majority of the 9,200 hourly workers are holding the line in their fight for respect and dignity on the job and for a contract with increased wages and pensions.
Local 8888 members are not receiving strike pay. Instead, USWA set up an office where workers submit bills to be paid. Despite financial pressures, many are determined to stick with this fight.
July 12, 1974
The movement for democratic rights in the Soviet Union won a major victory June 26 when former major general Pyotr Grigorenko was released after more than five years of confinement in Soviet psychiatric prisons.
A revolutionary Marxist, Grigorenko founded the Union of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism in 1963. He was active in demanding that the Crimean Tatars, the Chechen and the Ingush people, as well as the Volga Germans, be allowed to return to their homelands.
The timing of Grigorenko’s release is probably due to the bureaucracy’s fear that he would become an even more powerful symbol were he to die in prison. At the same time, about 50 Jewish activists have reportedly been arrested in Moscow and Kishinev.
July 11, 1949
With the Senate’s adoption of 28 “improvements” on the Taft-Hartley Act, the Democratic Party’s pledge to repeal the Slave Labor Law has gone up in smoke. This fact alone should call for the re-evaluation by the union leaders of their present political policies and their projection of a fresh program as the next step for organized labor.
The Democratic Party never put up a fight for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act — and never intended to. As a capitalist party the Democratic Party seeks to tie labor to the capitalist state.
Labor must move boldly forward. November 1950 will inevitably bring more disappointments unless the unions call a Congress of Labor and construct a united program of independent labor action, with a labor party as plank No. 1.