4, SOCIALIST APPEAL MAY 11, 1940 Flint Auto Union Launches Drive Steel Workers! Fight for Hour Mother Day Is For 30 Hour Week at 40 Hour Pay Day, Hour Pay Is Main Fight May 12 What of Other 364 Days?
strikes at. Continued from Page 1)
the steel bosses and make work for thousands Only Way to Save Men Jobs and keep the Union Strong. salaries is burning holes in their pockets.
of your brothers. You decided that at your conGrace of Bethlehem earned (stole would be a vention in Pittsburgh more than two years ago.
Proposal Sent to International and Locals; Fisher Body better word) 378, 698; Fairless of Carnegie, You said then: Let the steel bosses have their 100, 000: Weir, 122, 900 and ditto for their pals technological improvement. But make them pay By ANTOINETTE KONIKOW, Local Will Publish Material to Educate the Membership Mother Day comes this Sunday, May 12. What a who pulled down tidy little sums that managed to for it out of their fat profits. Improvements keep the wolf from the door.
Yes! But not out of the hides of the workers.
mockery! The brain storm of those miracle men of THE SIX HOUR DAY WITH EIGHT HOURS this ailing system, the advertising specialists, who But the prosperity Just didn get around to the PAY. that was the resolution you adopted at conceived it as business tone and a rare opportunity FLINT, Mich. May The first important blow in in the industry, and that unless the work week is man who made it possible. You mill workers in to unload on a limitless public (everyone has your convention. That is the immediate answer to a moththe struggle of the auto workers for the 80 hour week shortened, no man job is safe. Between 1925 and Gary and Pittsburgh and Youngstown don have er) tawdry and unsaleable merchandise that might the problem of unemployment in the steel indusat 40 hours pay was struck here Saturday when the 1938, for example, new technological devices made it to be told this. You know it in the kind of try.
otherwise remain unsold. Thus a fine and genuine Fisher Body Local No. 581, representing the militant possible to make a car with 33 fewer hours of labor language no writer can ever put down on paper Everybody knows this is the only way. Your emotion is degraded and distorted by contact with 7, 000 workers of the great South Fisher plant, passed per unit. the language of poverty and unemployment.
leaders, Murray, Van Bittner and the others travthe world of quick sales and huge profits. Mother love a strong resolution calling more this an immediate Fisher Body itself today employs at least two While production was going full blast in Novemel up and down the country making speeches is now given its market value by these worthy senNegotiating Committee to ber, 1939, six percent above the 1929 peak, unthousand fewer men than nine or ten years ago.
about the number one problem unemployment.
timentalista, the manufacturers and shopkeepers, demand.
And yet today much more is produced in the huge employment, Phillip Murray says, was enorMurray even wrote a book advocating the sixwhose crabbed souls respond to only one overpowermous.
The resolution, which stated that from all IndicaSouth Fisher plant, biggest body plant in the world.
hour day at eight houry pay.
ing emotion greed for profit.
In Pittsburgh, he adds, one out of every Ave tions this essential demand is being tossed into the At one time this plant made only Buick bodies.
But what have they done to carry out the waste basket in violation of the decision of the CleveToday mother is feted with candy and flowers and Today it makes Buick, Chevrolet, Pontiac, and able bodied workers was unemployed.
mandate of that convention? What have they gifts. Today, by order of the bosses, everyone rememland convention, explicitly demands that the 30Oldsmobile bodies.
In Youngstown relief rolls remained at the high depression level.
done to carry out the desires of thousands of hour week at 40 hours pay be included as an imbers mother. Tomorrow and tomorrow, for 364 tomorrows mother continues to struggle with problems creworkers expressed in resolutions from dozens of mediate demand in contractual negotiations with In addition to displacing men, technological im The same or worse for the other steel cities.
provements are used by the company to create waves lodges for the six hour day at eight hours pay?
ated by those very bosses and their system poverty, GM. This action will undoubtedly serve as the of chaos and uncertainty in the plants, displacing Conspiracy Against the Nothing. Nothing but talk.
unemployment, hunger, want, disease, and the scourge head of a wave of demands throughout the UAW CIO They will say that nothing can be done until which often deprives her of her motherhood war!
that negotiators go down the line for this slogan, as ing. This tles up the union apparatus with a moun Steel Workers Little Steel is organized. But why is Little What does motherhood mean to the wife of a workthe only step which can ift the auto union out of its er or middle class man today? Mother may be the tain of grievances, so preoccupying many of the leadJethargy.
Steel unorganized The workers didn share in the prosperity be For the same reason that you don have the wage earner, partially or totally. Motherhood meang ers that they do not see the main problem, cause there was no work for one third, and only For almost two weeks the GM negotiators, includsix hour day at elght hours pay: the leaders of extra work and constant worry not only for the iming Walter Reuther, Thomas, President of the part time work for another third. For the past your union were begging everybody to do it for mediate present but also for the future. Mothers reten years the steel bosses have been working up a UAW, and other Executive Board members, have been Points the Way For All them, every boss politician, Roosevelt, Governor call their own unhappy childhood, their overworked, wallowing through an interminable list of grievances, big conspiracy against the steel workers. They The action of Fisher Body Local No. 681 points Davey, the National Guard, the Labor Board. embittered parents dulled and aged by lives of toll piled up over a period of months while the main are plotting to get more work out of fewer men, the way for the UAW CIO. It serves as a call to to bring higher profits with lower employment.
They forgot you, the steel workers. And when and drudgery with whom no real companionship was problem of insecurity and unemployment in the inarms for the militant union men throughout the possible. They remember their dreams of school, of To hide their dirty plot, they call it technological they forgot you they forgot the only force that dustry, which has caused widespread discontent Industry.
can ever build union under Girdler nose or improvement.
training for useful work, of simple luxuries, of conamong the auto workers, remains unsolved.
For two years now the VAW CIO, torn by inner The conspiracy has already made big progress make the big boys come across with the six hour tact with an unknown world of art and music most day at eight hours pay.
of which were never realized. And because they so strife, and bogged down by a shortsighted leadership, The continuous hot strip mills have thrown over Same Local Started Sit Downs love their children, born and unborn, women today has fiddled around with minor problems, constantly 37, 000 workers on the street for good. Within a recoll from motherhood rather than see repeated by few on the defensive. Little Steel CAN years another 17, 000 will follow them out of The action of the Fisher Body local, the union the industry. With these new methods 27 autothose dear to them a miserable childhood and thwartthat staged the first alt down in Flint, and which The Fisher resolution for the so hour week at Be Organized!
matic steel strip mills built since 1924 have a ed preparation for adult life.
has carved a memorable record of milltancy for it40 hours pay is a militant call for an offensive in combined capacity of 15 million tons. Republic HOW WILL YOU EVER ORGANIZE LIT Many women today are on strike against children, self since the beginning of the auto union, will auto, to lift the unlon from the plane of defensivo Cleveland strip mill puts oat 70, 000 gross tons TLE STEELOnly when you show these work as their expression of protest against the conditions reverberate up and down the auto area, especially retreat to vigorous and courageous forward ers that you mean business. Just tell these men in which they must face motherhood and raise famiin GM.
march toward a great advance. Once the fight is of steel per month and employs a maximum of 2, 000 men. 126 men in automatic mills can prowho have a record of militancy, who have written Hies. The first inquiry of every newly married woman launched for the 80 hour week at 40 hours pay, the duce the same tonnage as 4, 512 men in hand mills.
many a heroic page of American labor history, It is an indication of great significance that the is how to avoid unwanted motherhood. Has human UAW CIO will once again plow ahead, as in 1986 auto workers are well aware that ordinary demands that you are planning fight for the six hour day Five workers can now produce the same quantity nature changed? Have women become hard and loveand 1987, and an inspired membership will fight to of steel that six produced five years ago.
at eight hours pay tell them that and not less and serish? How absurd! The urge to recreate no longer answer their needs. The auto workers know victory.
The technological changes have been a thousand Tom Girdlers, not a hundred Chicago one own, to watch the development of and are becoming more and more acquainted with the human beMassacres, will stop the organization of Little ing, almost part of yourself, from a little animal that problem. They know for example, that last year plague, not an improvement to the steel workers.
main Nothing can revitalize the auto union so much as a General Motors made 59 more profits than in 1988; Steel.
The steel bosses, through the American Iron sleeps and eats to a growing, thinking adult whose struggle for the 30 hour week at 40 hours pay, which It up to you and no one else.
and Steel Institute, are crowing over the success but that employment did not rise along with proprogress you follow with pride and concern that inat the main problem, the unemployment crisis duction.
Girdler is hoping that you will once again turn stinctive desire for progeny cannot be repressed no!
in the industry, and the insecurity of employment of their conspiracy of technological improveyour fate over to friends of labor, to boss pollment. In their journals they boast about how not even by the capitalist system Auto workers know that while the corporation today deprives which hangs as a constant threat over the head of ticians, to conferences of business, government they eliminated 14 million dollars from the 80 many parents of their right to raise families. The made 183, 000, 000 in profits last year, tens of thou every man in the plants.
monthly pay envelopes of the steel workers from and labor. He hopes for that, because he knows dream of most young married couples is to achieve Bands were still unemployed.
In Flint the Buick plants have passed resolutions 1937 to 1939; they boast about how they raised the friends of labor will stab you in the back. that condition of modest financial security which will They know that technological improvements evsimilar to the Fisher Body resolution, and it 18 ex productive efficiency by one fifth while they fired he knows he can buy up the boss politicians and make it possible for them to have a child and perhaps ery year eat into the jobs of the workers. Last year pected that the next general membership meeting 37, 000 workers from the industry; they lick their stall your conferences out of business.
a whole family.
the Individual worker produced an average of 24 will go on record for the action.
chops over the nine percent increase in finished The steel workers back home are hoping you Women today are not granted (legally) the right to cars, while the year before he made only 21 cars.
The resolution is being sent to all local unions of steel prices. The steel bosses are sailing along, decide to fight. They will back you to the limit. regulate the size and spacing of their family. Clinics The corporation got three more cars out of each the International, planning big things, pushing us into the war so You can depend on that.
and physicians in many states are not permitted to worker labor.
they can make tremendous profits. 700, 000, 000 And not only they, but the auto workers, the The Fisher Body men have made their decision to inform women about birth control. business dealing Thinking members of the union are awaking to fight for the 30 hour week at 40 hour pay clear.
was their fee for patriotism in the last war) and construction workers, all the workers of this in bootleg Information, dispensing inadequate, exto the fact that every year new devices displace men employ less and less men.
pensive and often harmful drugs and appliances has They now awalt action on the part of the negotiOnly one force can stop them: the organized ators meeting with GM, and above all they await As Steel goes, so go the workers of the nation.
been created because of this hypocritical and barbaric from their brothers in other local unions steel workers!
SIX HOUR DAY AT EIGHT HOURS PAY 18 law. Women every day endanger their health, sutter gudeneral Motors.
pain and needless torture, rather than bear children in the marching slogan of American labor.
Steel Workers Know What to Do whom they can offer nothing but love.
GM workers: Fisher Body Local No. 581 has Will Steel lead the parade?
APPEAL. It up to you, deleSOCIALIST Today with war on the agenda, celebration of MothYou know what to do to fight the conspiracy of shown the way to a solution of your problems!
gates of the swOC convention!
er Day adds insult to hypocricy. Mother, the bossVol. IV, No. 19 Saturday, May 11, 1940 Rally to their support!
es say, we appreciate you you bear the young men Per we need for the army. You suffer and toil sacrifice Published Weekly by the and plan, to produce fine healthy boys. We can use SOCIALIST APPEAL PUBLISHING ASS Flint Fisher Body Resolution plenty of them in battle with the sons of mothers of at 116 University Place, New York, The Fisher Body resolution reads as follows: other countries to protect our trade and profits Telephone: Algonquin 8547 that is democracy. The thought of those mothers WHEREAS: We have now established by overwhelmwhose sons are killed shouldn disturb you. They are Editorial Board: ing vote in GM that the CIO has the exclusive power enemies and haven the same feelings as you have.
to bargain for the employes of that corporation, and FELIX MORROW ALBERT GOLDMAN What that you say? Your son may be killed and the WHEREAS: The greatest problem facing our union sons of other mothers are not enemies? Yes, but General Manager: Technological 18 the fact that thousands of auto workers are tounemployment, relief and WPA rolls to eke out Six months after the declaration threatening the livelihood of every less than a bare existence. of war steel production has subthen you will have the satisfaction of knowing he died day suffering the pangs of unemployment, having GEORGE CLARKE a hero and you will be rewarded with a gold medal been displaced by new machines and technological worker in steel industry, has fixed. Moreover, even the relatively sided to a lower level than it had and given an honor seat at public functions. Besides, devices, and itself as the most pressing and few jobs created by the introduc stood before the outbreak of hosthe probably would not have had a job, and have been permanent problem confronting tion of the hot strip mills have ilities.
Subscriptions: 00 per year 00 for six months.
WHEREAS: This growing army of unemployed a bum or a crook, 90 perhaps it just as well.
Foreign. 00 per year, 50 for six months. Bundle the Steel Workers Organizing been denied the hand mill work Now that the war has spread orders: cents per copy in the United States: centa stands as a threat to organized labor because of Committee. Since 1926 when the ers on the grounds that they to Scandinavia and is menacing Mothers! The sugar coated gifts hide the bitter pill per copy in all foreign countries. Single coples: centa necessity they must work for scab wages or starve, continuous hot strip mill was first have difficulty in adapting them even wider areas a new lease on of the boss system. Under capitalism there can be no and are forced to take any job at any wage by re introduced, one hundred thousand selves to the new and more rapia life has again been taken out, and improvement of conditions for women, mothers of lief administrations, and employees have lost their jobs production.
again such hope among the unfamilies. Only in a Socialist society will mothers Reentered a second class matter December 1939. at the post office at New York, under the WHEREAS: Technological unemployment also threat with the gradual displacement of achieve that security which will permit them to raise employed is doomed to disapAct of March 1879 the old hand mill for the more Steel Ghost Towns children without fear for their future. But no one pointment. Today the strip mill ens every man inside the plants, there being no efficient hot strip mill. While the security as long as new machines are used to diswill give you that as a gift. You will have to struggle Whole towns, as though rav capacity exceeds 19, 000, 000 tons, steel industry as a whole has been aged by a plague, have been de at least one sixth higher than the and fight for Socialism, you together with the workplace men instead of to shorten the work day, and operating at much less than 70 vastated by the onslaught of this producti 937 16, 000, 000)
ers, men and women, black and white, old and young Fight with the Socialist Workers WHEREAS: At the last convention of the UAW in per cent capacity, the producers labor saving device. Ghost which was a boom year. The. in this country and in others. for their cause is Cleveland we adopted a program to meet this situayours and only through the victory of the workers Party for: tion, the demand for the 30 hour week at 40 hours chine Co. and United Engineering Elwood, Indiana wa polisie eben: year 1939 saw a marked decline will mothers solve their problems. Only when all manpay, which to this day remains only a phrase in our Foundry Co. have been work vania; Newport, Kentucky; and 1937, so that even a twenty per kind raises itself from slavery and exploitation and JOB AND DECENT LIVING FOR EVERY program, nothing having been done about it, and ing at a full one hundred per cent Follansbee, West Virginia have cent increase in the steel industry enjoys a free and full life will women choose motherWORKER WHEREAS: General Motors can afford to give us the capacity. At the same time hot sprung up former industrial due to war demands would not hood happily, confidently and proudly. Rearing and OPEN THE IDLE FACTORIES. OPERATE 30 hour week with no reduction in pay today and strip capacity since 1930 has communities gutted of their cen overtax the present strip mill preparing the young for a life in a socialist society, THEM UNDER WORKERS CONTROL.
for useful labor, for boundless achievements in selnot tomorrow, with all their hundreds of millions of mounted over four hundred per tral industries and existing on the capacity.
cent profits pouring into the coffers of the coupon clipgrace of government relief sub Even if extraordinary demands TWENTY. BILLION DOLLAR FEDERAL ence, industry and art that will indeed make of That the continuous hot strip sidies.
PUBLIC WORKS AND HOUSING PROGRAM motherhood an interesting, important and honored pers, and mill is the most effective labor with the outbreak of the Se steel as a result of other counare placed upon the production of profession. THIRTY THIRTY 30. WEEKLY MINIMUM WHEREAS: From all indications this essential de saving device ever produced in cond World War last September tries, including the becom Boston, Mass.
WAGE 30 HOUR WEEKLY MAXIMUM FOR mand is being tossed into the waste basket in viola the steel industry, is readily seen rumors of good times swept ing involved in the war, and the ALL WORKERS ON ALL JOBS.
tion of the decision of the Cleveland convention, no by the tremendous reduction of throughout the steel area. The obsolete hand mills throughout plans made to put it into effect in the immediate man power in the manufacture of hope of jobs rekindled among the country are reopened, these 30 WEEKLY OLD. AGE AND DISABILITY future; steel. Today 15 men in the hot the unemployed; a new prosperity will operate only for a limited Sheik Khalil Ben Ibrahime al Rawat of Arabia, PENSION who is visiting America to negotiate oil deals, was THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That this local de strip mills can produce as much with the coming of war orders was time and will close down finally. EXPROPRIATE THE SIXTY FAMILIES.
much embarrassed when he arrived at New York mands that the 30 hour week at 40 hours pay be inas 100 in the hand mills. Formerly anticipated. The Big Boom was war boom can only serve to El Morrocco and discovered the Senegambian door 15, 500, 000 tons production in the on its way to steel. Newspapers postpone the day when every ALL WAR FUNDS TO THE UNEMPLOYED. cluded as an immediate demand in contractual negotiations with GM, in addition to the necessary dehand mills required 125, 000 work like the Pittsburgh Press ran hand mill worker will find himself man wearing a costume almost exactly like the PEOPLE REFERENDUM ON ANY AND sheik It surely hurts the pride of all parasites to mands for a shop steward system, abolition of the ers; now 14, 000, 000 tons produced screaming headlines: GHOST cast out of the industry.
be mistaken for a worker.
ALL WARS. list, vacations with pay, seniority, etc. etc. in the strip mills requires only DOWNS IN DISTRICT STIR AS NO SECRET DIPLOMACY.
15, 000 workers. Fully eighty five MINES OPEN, and IS ADLet Bosses Pay!
AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That copies of per cent of all hand mill workers. DED TO BOO. Here and there Gradually the steel workers, Prince Michael of Rumania contributed a month 10. AN INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY.
this resolution be sent to Walter Reuther, all execu some of the highest paid in the mills were reopened.
employed and unemployed, have tive board members of the International, to the CIO pay as a member of the senate, 175, to the army 11. WORKERS DEFENSE GUARDS AGAINST industry who spent years in apCouncil in Fiint, and to all local unions of the Inbegun to realize what is happenWar Boom Flops VIGILANTE AND FASCIST ATTACKS.
equipment fund. He became a senator automatically prenticeship and training for ing, and the murmors of disconternational, and that the executive board of this loon reaching the age of 18. This is known as noblesse their skilled operation, have had But in December these mills tent have been changed into a 12. FULL SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC cal publish material to educate the membership on oblige, which is the same as sacrificing something their jobe pulled out from beneath began closing down, and the min new cry: Six Hour Day with EQUALITY FOR THE NEGRO PEOPLE. the importance of this demand.
you don miss and thereby get the name of being one them and have been thrown upon towns collapsed with a crash. Eight Hour Pay.
hell of a philanthropist.
Presses Down on Steel Workers Why We Defend the Soviet Union Speakers: FRI. MAY 17, P.
JAMES CANNON IRVING PLAZA The 4th International, the most consistent fighter against Stalinism, Irving Place 15th St.
New York City defends the Workers State created by the October Revolution of 1917 ALBERT GOLDMAN Admission: 25 Results of the Struggle Against the Petty Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party