Firemen staged an unprecedented job action for higher pay; the Newspaper Guild shut down the Daily News, 5,000 stewards and stewardesses grounded Trans World Airlines; and employees of the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Philharmonic were still on picket lines.
By far the largest action came when 30,000 hospital workers, most of them Black and Puerto Rican women, walked off their jobs Nov. 5 in an effort to win a 7.5 percent wage increase already promised in their union contract. The target of the strike by Drug and Hospital Workers Local 1199 is not just the hospital management but Nixon's Cost of Living Council, which has refused to allow the raise.
The strikers' case is simple: They are low-paid service, maintenance, and laboratory workers. Many of them take home only $130 a week. The contract they won in June 1972 included a 7.5 percent of $12 increase, whichever is greater, beginning last July. A scare campaign is being whipped up in the media about "danger" to patients and "violence" by strikers. Picketers respond that if the hospitals really care about their patients, they should simply pay the raise.
November 15, 1948
America's imperialist policy-makers are acutely alarmed over
the staggering military reverse suffered by the Chiang Kai-shek
regime. With the loss of Manchuria and North China, the Chiang
dictatorship has little chance of surviving.
The impending downfall of this Chinese Franco is viewed by American Big Business as nothing less than a calamity. They fear that all China - first in population and second in size among countries of the world - may pass under Stalinist influence.
Washington's support of the Chiang regime has aroused bitter hatred of America among the Chinese people. This became evident soon after V-J Day, when giant student demonstrations in Shanghai and other cities demanded that American troops, get out of China. Two American citizens in Peiping wrote a letter to The New York Times, published in the Nov. 17 issue, calling attention to the hatred which American support of Chiang has aroused. Chiang's planes, they say, follow a policy that "seems to be to bomb and strafe any concentration of people they can sight, to attack any building of size whatever its use, and to specialize on cities that have just suffered the trials of siege and capture whether there is any hope of early recovery or not."