July 26, 1974
BALTIMORE - The American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has been conducting a drive to
enlist the great unorganized majority of public employees into
the ranks of the union.
The one completely reactionary aspect of this otherwise positive campaign has been the recruitment of cops and prison guards into AFSCME.
The recent Baltimore strike offered the spectacle, unique in labor history, of members of one union local being clubbed, arrested, fingerprinted, and thrown in jail by members of another local of the same union!
On the occasion of the New York City cop "strike" in January 1971, a Militant editorial explained that cops "are not part of the labor movement." The Militant wrote: "The duty of cops is to take orders from their capitalist masters, which means breaking strikes, smashing demonstrations, and beating Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano heads. The New York cops are not asking for an end to these duties. That would mean an end to their jobs. Rather they are asking for more money to compensate them for carrying out these actions....
"Cops are not like rank-and-file GIs who are forced into the Army. There is no law that says a person must be a cop. They willingly choose to be cops. They ask to serve as armed protectors of the ruling class and rapidly become corrupted."
July 25, 1949
The steel strike scheduled to begin on July 16 was suddenly
called off by Philip Murray, President of the CIO United Steel
Workers, after Benjamin F. Fairless, head of the U.S. Steel
Corporation, and the officials of the other basic steel
companies accepted Truman's proposal for a 60-day "cooling off"
period.
The Truman plan calls for an extension of the present union agreements for 60 days. Truman, at the same time, named a three man Fact Finding Board which is to hold hearings on the union demands and make nonbinding recommendations within 45 days. The steel corporations have already taken pains to make clear that "there is to be no moral or legal obligation to accept any recommendation which the board may make."
Meanwhile, the spotlight has turned on to the auto union which is engaged in negotiations with the Ford Motor Company on its fourth round economic demands. The recent Milwaukee convention of the UAW has authorized the levying of a special strike assessment, in the event that Ford is closed down, which would raise about 8 million dollars. In addition to its economic demands, the convention adopted a resolution introduced by the delegates of Ford River Rouge Local 600 forbidding the inclusion of any so-called company security clauses in the next contract, under which the Ford management instituted its brutal speedup.