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   Vol. 69/No. 50           December 26, 2005  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
December 26, 1980
The January 15 national march and rally in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is a timely and important demonstration for the rights of Black people. Initiated by Stevie Wonder, the renowned entertainer and composer, the Washington, D.C., action will demand that King’s birthday be instituted as a national holiday.

Among other supporters of the King Day march are Rev. Jesse Jackson, national president of Operation PUSH, and Cleveland Robinson of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

Some chapters of the newly established National Black Independent Political Party are supporting the demonstration.

Like the formation of the NBIPP, the momentum behind the January 15 march expresses the desire of hundreds of thousands of Black people to press forward the struggle for justice in the face of stepped-up attacks from the KKK and other racist terrorists, big business, and the government.  
 
December 26, 1955
Dec. 21—Fifty-six thousand Westinghouse strikers were presented with quite a Christmas present by the government yesterday. Herbert Brownell Jr., Attorney General, in behalf of Eisenhower’s Department of Justice, filed a petition with the Subversive Activities Control Board asking that the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Independent, representing 11,000 of these strikers, be declared a “subversive” organization.

The government is acting under the Communist Control Law of 1954 against a union with a total membership of around 100,000. This law, passed in August 1954, created a new category of organizations to be persecuted by the witch hunt: Communist “infiltrated” unions. The government chose to invoke this infamous new repressive law in the ninth week of the Westinghouse strike involving 11,000 UE members and 45,000 members of the International Union of Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO.  
 
December 1, 1930
Recently two events, little known and little noticed, have rendered splendid proof of increasing unemployment pressure by the rank and file, at least within certain sections of the trade union movement, to the point where some officials have felt compelled to endeavor to get into some sort of motion so as to stave off what they consider “something worse.” They have, of course, been entirely overshadowed by the din of the noisy charity campaigns to which capitalism has resorted in every city. But they grew from the same cause, the unemployment crisis, and likewise materialized because of the fear of real working class action.

The first event was the national conference of some seven hundred general chairmen and executive officers of the five railroad transportation brotherhoods to consider the six-hour day. The second event was the meeting of the Chicago Federation of Labor, Nov. 16th, adopting a resolution for the shorter workday for all federal employees.  
 
 
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