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Vol. 73/No. 23      June 15, 2009

 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
June 15, 1984
SHEFFIELD, England—“What you now have in South Yorkshire is an actual police state, tantamount to something you are used to seeing in Chile or Bolivia,” stated Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, following a series of violent attacks by police on coal miners picketing the Orgreave Coke Depot, near Sheffield, May 29 and 30.

The miners have been on strike for nearly three months against British government plans to close many mines permanently and throw thousands of miners out of work.

In response, the British government has unleashed a wave of police violence and a crackdown on the democratic rights of miners and other unionists that causes many to recall previous historic British labor confrontations such as the 1926 general strike.  
 
June 15, 1959
NEW YORK—More than 2,000 striking workers from seven hospitals jammed the main ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat tonight. They roared their approval as their union president, Leon J. Davis, bitterly assailed the police force for its brutal attack on pickets yesterday.

The striking members of Local 1199, Retail Drug Employees Union, AFL-CIO, voted unanimously not to act on a proposed formula for settling the strike until the union held a scheduled meeting with Mayor Wagner.

Davis also proposed that the strikers begin taking time off the picket lines to participate in a stepped-up organizing drive of some 70 other voluntary hospitals and indicated that the union might be forced to strike still other hospitals where the workers have already been signed up.  
 
June 16, 1934
For the last two months the capitalist press has been calling for the blood of the “reds” in the New York school system. By “reds” is meant anybody who has the courage to put up a squawk against some aspect of the feudal regime of the reactionary Board of Education or who lifts a finger to fight against wage cuts. On the 4th of May the New York American tried to smear a coat of red-wash over 700 teachers who had signed a petition circulated by the Teachers Anti-War Committee.

The central purpose of this barrage was to whip up a red scare and create sentiment for the passage by the state legislature of the Ives Bill. The bill was intended to place man-hunting weapons in the hands of the state to crush the teachers’ resistance to wage cuts and other “economy” measures by expelling militants as seditious and treasonable people.  
 
 
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