Vol. 71/No. 24      June 18, 2007

Cuba, Mexico, and Spain are the three other governments that have acted most quickly in response to Nicaragua’s appeal for international disaster aid.

At the end of May, the worst rain storm in a century caused some $200 million in damage to Nicaragua—an amount totaling nearly half the country’s yearly income from exports.

Construction workers from Cuba are already at work helping repair and replace major bridges destroyed by the storms.  
 
June 17, 1957
Women comprise one-third of the United States labor force but receive only one-fifth of the national income, and as long as this basic inequality remains, the revolution in women’s employment will not be fully achieved. But the changes that have occurred in the lives of American women in the last sixty to seventy years do have a profoundly revolutionary character, since they strike at the basic causes of women’s inferior status which lead to the exploitation of women in both marriage and employment.

In 1890, only half of the women in this country worked at any time in their lives and their average participation in paid employment was eleven years. Today, 90% of all women work at least part of their lives, and today’s school girl can anticipate about twenty-five years in paid employment.  
 
June 18, 1932
Henry Ford has let the cat out of the bag. Why should an employer of labor on an extensive scale worry about workers who “haven’t got five cents for a head of lettuce?” Yet that is what he is thinking about, according to a recent interview written up in the New York Times.

When the interviewer questioned the efficiency of Ford’s plan for each of his workers raising his own lettuce instead of buying it, Ford replied, “I know plenty of workers who haven’t got five cents for a head of lettuce!”

So it happens that Ford of all people is perfectly ready to sap modern principles of efficiency such as mass production, the division of labor, and specialization of work and skill and evolve instead a system of compulsory gardening for each worker.  
 
 
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