Vol.59/No.20           May 22, 1995 
 
 
25 And 50 Years Ago  

May 19, 1970
As the strike wave on the nation's campuses spread, there were indications that antiwar sentiment within the ranks of organized labor was also deepening and beginning to break through to the surface: Striking students are clearly making every effort to reach out to the broader forces.

Without question the most dramatic sign of this occurred on May 7 when the national convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, meeting in Denver, adopted a resolution calling for the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Southeast Asia.

The resolution was adopted by a more than two-thirds majority of the 1,400 delegates.

AFSCME, with 460,000 members, is the eighth largest union in the AFL-CIO. It is the fastest-growing union in the country (1,000 new members per week).

In Los Angeles, AFT Local 1990 at the University of California at Los Angeles accepted a motion at an emergency membership meeting May 6 demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Southeast Asia.

May 19, 1945
Everybody knows about the 102-story Empire State Building, tallest and showiest in the world. Tourists visit it. A wealthy corporation owns it. The rich occupy it. But who knows anything about the cleaning women who toil and sweat throughout the nights to keep its swanky offices clean and shiny?

"They don't care nothing about us poor scrub women," said one of them to me when I interviewed a group of them on May 11, at the offices of their local union 32-J, AFL Building Service Employees, at 250 West 57th Street, New York City. "We asked for only a nickel an hour raise, and the War Labor Board turned it down - after giving us the run-around for months!" The women were tense and fighting mad. Last week, they said, they demanded a strike. But they were prevailed upon to wait another ten days pending further negotiations.

Her black eyes flashing, one of the women told me about their working conditions and pay. "We get 55 cents an hour straight time for seven hours and 96 cents with overtime. All of us work twelve hours because we just couldn't live without overtime. All of us have kids - some as many as six or eight and you can't feed them on $19 a week."  
 
 
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