February 14, 2000
Dairy farmers in the Northeast held coordinated actions Feb. 1 to protest the low prices they are receiving for milk. Prices have fallen 39 percent since September. Such low prices have not been seen since 1978. “Milk the Cow, Not the Farmer!” was the slogan carried by about 75 farmers and supporters outside the Dean Foods milk processing plant in western Pennsylvania.
One person who came to support the farmers was Larry Pugh, a locked-out steelworker from AK Steel in Mansfield, Ohio. The 600 workers there have been locked out since the end of August. When asked why he had driven the 135 miles to the rally, Pugh responded, “I volunteer to help anybody who has a problem. Working people are going to have to lock elbows and stand together.”
Farmers were interested in talking to Pugh and took the literature he passed out about the lockout.
February 14, 1975
In Internationalism or Russification? Ivan Dzyuba describes how a poetry reading in honor of the Ukrainian national poet, Taras Shevchenko, in March 1965 was interrupted by a Communist Party official who shouted, “Translate that into human language, we don’t understand Banderist language!” (A derogatory term for Ukrainian.)
This official was sent to the Sixth World Congress of Trade Unions as a member of the Ukrainian delegation.
“I am firmly convinced,” writes Dzyuba, “that the anxiety felt by an ever-widening circle of Ukrainian youth is the inevitable result of a total revision of the Leninist nationalities policy carried out by Stalin in the 1930s and continued by Khrushchev in the last decade.” These policies are the same tsarist Russifying program, carried on in the name of proletarian internationalism.
February 13, 1950
For the eighth time Truman personally has invoked the Taft-Hartley Act against American workers. The president, who before election promised repeal of this law, is now using it for the third time against the coal miners.
The miners have answered this attempt to club them back into the pits without a contract with their characteristic independence and militancy. They shut down almost all bituminous mines, adding some 270,000 strikers to the 100,000 out prior to Truman’s decree. Truman has joined forces with the parasitic coal operators, the steel corporations, the Congressional labor-baiters.
The decisive question in this crucial struggle against government strikebreaking is: What will the AFL and CIO unions do? The government’s deadly thrust at all labor can be warded off by the concerted action of the whole labor movement.