Eighty people attended the meeting at the Southern University of New Orleans. Included were elected officials of the two largest union locals in the area, representing New Orleans dockworkers and teachers, as well as representatives of the steelworkers, painters, and piledrivers.

Brian Weber, a white steelworker in Gramercy, Louisiana, has sued to overturn the affirmative-action program negotiated by the United Steelworkers of America in its contract with Kaiser Aluminum.

The meeting at Southern University was especially significant because union officials have begun to take the lead, together with Black community and women’s movement leaders, in a campaign to defend equal job rights for Blacks and women. This unity reflects a growing awareness that Weber’s suit against the USWA contract is an attempt to divide and weaken the entire labor movement.

Rev. Isidore Booker, chairperson of the Civil Rights Committee of USWA Local 13000, called Weber “the most far-reaching case that affects affirmative action since its inception.”  
 
December 14, 1953
The full employment conference of the CIO United Automobile Workers, held in Washington on Dec. 6 and 7, has helped to focus attention on the growing problem of unemployment and the threat of economic crisis. It is to be hoped that this will help lead to the recognition of the necessity for a broad Congress of Labor, representing all sections of the labor movement, to deal with unemployment, McCarthyism and other basic issues that can be solved only through the united action of all organized labor.

Under the direction of UAW President Walter Reuther, however, the auto union’s conference served as little more than a sounding board for Reuther’s own inadequate program. His main stress was on the vague, guaranteed-annual-wage program that he pushed at the recent CIO convention.

Unemployment is an integral part of the workings of the capitalist system. The present growing unemployment is technological in large part. A new rationalization of industry, displacing workers at a fearful rate, is under way. Automation, as this superrationalization process is called, threatens joblessness for millions.

The demand for the 30-hour week at 40 hours’ pay offers the only immediate answer to the threat of mass unemployment that automation involves.  
 
 
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