For nearly 100 days after the strike began August 1, the companies arrogantly refused to negotiate key issues and branded the walkout "illegal."

That hard line began to crack in early November when the strikers launched an aggressive campaign to win broad labor support. They held a mass rally in Virginia, Minnesota, sent an appeal to all 5,400 USWA locals, and dispatched representatives to the big Chicago-area steel mills to address local meetings and solicit support.

For the first time, the companies made an offer on the union demand for incentive-pay plans. Iron ore locals want bonus plans to raise their wages to the level in basic steel.

The offer was unanimously rejected as inadequate by an eighty-member negotiating committee representing all the locals.

Local union meetings across the iron range backed up their negotiators by rejecting the deal, often by unanimous votes. There was a lot of discussion, one union source said, "not about why we rejected it, but why would the international [union] ask us to take such a ridiculous proposal."

As negotiations continue, the strikers are pressing ahead to build the December 17 rally as a massive show of strength.  
 
December 1, 1952
One of the outstanding features of the frameup trial that opened Nov. 20 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the biggest of its kind to-date in Eastern Europe, is the stress on the Jewish origin of the defendants in the dock.

As a matter of fact, this was also true of the very first attacks, after Lenin’s death, against Leon Trotsky and the anti-Stalinist opposition he then led inside the Soviet Union.

Heading the list of 14 defendants, of whom 11 are of Jewish origin, is Rudolf Slansky, former General Secretary of the Czech Communist Party, life-long agent of the Kremlin. The charge of "Zionist conspirators" is ranked in the indictment as second only to the customary charge of "Trotskyism."

The use of anti-Semitism in the Kremlin’s foreign policy, principally in the Middle East, is clear enough. Here Stalin is playing the game of the most reactionary Arab elements and stands thereby to gain favor in their eyes.

But Stalin’s use of the weapon employed by Hitler is in the first instance dictated by internal needs. The Kremlin is in dire need of scapegoats for the intolerable oppression which it has imposed upon the East European countries.

How far Stalin will go on this road not only in Czechoslovakia but in other East European countries still remains, of course, to be seen. But it is already clear that the Czech frameup exceeds in its scope and consequences the previous set of "anti-Titoist" trials and purges in the East European countries.  
 
 
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