October 8, 1976
"Management toughness clearly explains the rise in strike activity across the U.S. to its highest level in two years," Business Week magazine acknowledged recently.

The Wall Street Journal also knows where the responsibility lies: "Many employers have begun taking a harder line at the bargaining table, and unions are responding with their ultimate weapon."

The employer offensive is encouraged by continuing high unemployment--ten million jobless after a year and a half of profitable economic "recovery."

The auto strike is now the biggest in progress. Meanwhile 18,000 Teamsters members have been forced into a defensive walkout against United Parcel Service.

Some of the harshest attacks have hit public employees, as all levels of government seek to cut social service spending. The two biggest teacher strikes so far this fall--in Seattle and Buffalo--have ended with mixed results.

At the same time, New York City has just extracted another $15 million in wage and benefit cuts from city employees. Among other things, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees agreed September 24 to a 10 percent wage cut for all new city workers.

San Diego's taxi strike illustrates another trend: the drive to isolate and destroy smaller, weaker unions wherever the employers think is possible.

For now the unions are on the defensive. But many workers are beginning to shed their illusions about the old policy of peaceful labor-management collaboration.  
 
October 8, 1951
Frank Barbaria and Harry Press, the Socialist Workers Party candidates for Mayor and Supervisor, have completed 18 appearances before union meetings in San Francisco after the first two weeks of campaigning.

The Ship Scalers and Painters local of the International and Longshoremen and Warehousemen's union responded with exceptional enthusiasm to Barbaria's socialist analysis and solution to the workers' problems today. Barbaria described the sharp drop in production in 1949...

"In spite of Marshall Plan money taken from the American taxpayers and distributed to European capitalists to purchase American goods, the spending of GI mustering-out pay and the workers using up what savings they may have tucked away during wartime employment, the market was still not enough to keep the capitalist machine going under peacetime production," Barbaria pointed out.

"There were 5 million unemployed and small businesses were going broke at the fastest rate in history. The growing economic crisis led to a more intensive struggle to capture old markets and conquer new ones. This is the basic cause of capitalist war. But now some of these markets and colonies are fighting for their independence, they don't want to be colonies any longer. This is the meaning of the war in Korea. We socialists demand the Asian people be allowed to decide their own fate and that American troops be withdrawn from foreign soil." The union membership indicated strong approval of this proposal by their applause.  
 
 
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