Editorials

...In each case, it's a grand design in the name of "development" (for some) to defraud Indians of communal lands, deprive them of the minimal legal protection they once had and reduce them to peonage...

...employers, large and small, should remember: if there is one thing the labor movement has, it is a long memory...

...In Brazil, Chile, and Peru, the situation is a little more subtle...

...What is likely to happen...

...With that in mind U.S...

...That fact was underscored by the strong affirmative vote of the Ford locals of the United Auto Workers to accept increased job security at the price of various givebacks...

...This is "hardball...

...Say, in nearby Guatemala, where enterprising generals are clearing the northern jungle province of Peten for oil and nickel exploration...

...Steel's own facilities in order to make the company truly competitive with foreign manufacturers - and to preserve American steelworkers' jobs...

...For years Big Steel has been pleading for more and more protection against foreign competition, and that pressure on the White House and Congress is getting stronger as it becomes clear that outdated U.S...

...auto sales continue to plummet...

...Meanwhile, as capital fled the region and economic conditions deteriorated, popular support for Misurasata grew - and, whether true or not, the government perceived that Steadman Fagoth and other Misurasata leaders were about to demand exclusive rights to what amounts to thirty-eight percent of the nation's territory...

...The only thing clear at this point is that what was essentially a conflict between federal resource policy and Indian land claims, not an easy matter under the best of circumstances, has become grist for the shouting match of East-West confrontation...

...this will increase in the months ahead as labor's opposition to Mr...

...organized labor in the United States is not without intellectual resources and imaginative leaders, and it will not be down in the dumps forever...

...Poland is not the only country that needs a strong and effective labor movement...

...The tide clearly seems to be moving against organized labor, and it is this movement Mr...

...Or try Colombia, perhaps the worst offender of Indian human rights in the subcontinent...

...Yet virtually every viable alternative to Reagan economic policies involves a greater degree of social planning, of administrative decisions on the use of resources and allocations of investments...

...Union lawyers failed in their effort to have the returns considered in one total figure...

...Organized labor in general lost 54.3 percent of government-supervised elections during the past fiscal year...

...they go well beyond that...

...shareholders and potential investors shouldn't suffer the effects of public disclosure merely to prevent future wrongdoing...

...We had read that the staff believed this was done with the knowledge and connivance of Citicorp's senior management...

...By the way, Citicorp paid no federal income taxes last year...

...Yes, there's real Indian trouble there...

...The phone call was from an old friend who works in one of Manhattan's sleeker towers...

...Mutual mistrust might have been allayed at this point but for two developments: (1) the heating up of border raids by ex-Somoza guardsmen, and (2) that when released in May, Steadman Fagoth also fled to Honduras and joined the Somozists...

...And it shouldn't be...

...In fact, this was the sixth consecutive year that unions failed to win 50 percent of the elections...

...Relations took a turn for the worse in August 1980 when the government announced the nationalization of non-arable Indian land...

...Just as we go to press, Nicaragua is reported as having suspended all guarantees of individual rights in response to U.S...

...In elections involving more than 458,000 workers, unions won only 45.7 percent of the 8,198 contests conducted by the NLRB...

...First the land issue...

...Take what happened to the United Steelworkers of America recently in its second major effort to organize industrial workers at plants of E.I...

...A DIFFERENT LAW...

...He must know that it is essential that labor broaden its social vision...

...Well, yes, we had...

...However, only a small minority of textile, construction, and chemical workers now belong to unions, and the federation seems to have serious trouble in organizing workers in the new high-technology industries - as much trouble as it has in winning recognition for unions in Catholic hospitals, Catholic social teaching or no...

...But there is more to organized labor's problems than that, and union members know it...

...In the meantime, however, we can see how one important Nicaraguan problem has become part of the geopolitical chessgame...

...Such a shift in economic policy poses the danger of elite or technocratic control, and this danger can best be offset by the participation of a broad-based movement like organized labor in the decision-making - a new role for labor that will require radically different thinking on its part...

...The coal miners' union has shrunk dramatically, and more and more coal is coming out of non-union mines, while safety standards continue to decline under the impetus of Washington budget cuts...

...In short, throughout Latin America, a crude, blindly expansionist developmentalism threatens to turn Indian cultures into dead specimens for the Metropolitan Museum's display of "primitive art...

...You're expected to get away with whatever you can...

...And when a tip of the iceberg was exposed by a Citibank employee in 1977, the bank engaged in an extensive cover-up, altering documents and, two years later, retroactively changing its books for 1976 and 1977...

...Which is what the top SEC officials have vetoed...

...Tell all that to the IRS when it investigates your tax returns...

...Business unionism in this country is a long way from being dead, but business-as-usual unionism is on its way to the undertaker...

...Fearing further repression, some three thousand Miskito fled across the Honduran border...

...That would require a formal SEC public proceeding and perhaps further legal action...

...historically, their most recent "benefactors" were U.S...

...If the SEC staff memorandum is accurate, then Citicorp began contriving artificial sales and shifts of currencies in the early seventies to avoid paying taxes in various European nations...

...SACRIFICIAL PAWNS...

...Further, they contended, because Citicorp had never represented to stockholders or investors that its senior management had 'honesty and integrity,' it had no legal duty to disclose breaches of these norms...

...But as it turned out, Du Pont's procedural advantage made little difference...

...There is a somewhat shopworn tradition of intellectuals' waxing censorious at the ethics of big business...

...If, for instance, the bank's branch in London sold West German marks at an artificially low rate to a Bahamas branch, the effect would be...

...Ecuador alone is an exception to this rule...

...they didn't harm stockholders (but presumably someone shouldered the tax burden Citicorp avoided...

...The pioneering United Auto Workers has obviously fallen on very hard times, as thousands upon thousands of workers have been laid off and U.S...

...That sum could have paid for the modernization of U.S...

...Under a labor board ruling sought by Du Pont, employees at each of the fourteen plants involved, from Tennessee to New Jersey, voted on the question of union representation only at their own locations...

...And thus we come to the forced relocation of Miskito Indians dwelling along the river Coco bordering Honduras...

...These officials," read the New York Times story, "did not dispute the evidence presented by the enforcement staff, but described the violations as insignificant and harmless...

...Exiled Indian leaders in Honduras charge the government with militarization of their villages, bombings, and the massacre of some ninety-five Indians...

...MISCELLANEOUS One theory around Washington is that the captured Nicara-guans who keep embarrassing the U.S...

...It is too early to say for sure, but one thing to look for is greater participation in politics and an ever closer relationship with the liberal wing of the Democratic party, accompanied by the emergence of younger and more innovative leaders...

...I've been pondering it all morning...

...But remember, those paragraphs were written by ostensible defenders, not critics, of corporate behavior...

...Jittery Sandinistas reacted by arresting thirty Misurasata leaders in February of last year...

...It is the reasoning offered by these officials, at least as expressed in leaked reports, that set our friend to pondering...

...steelmaking plants cannot compete with more modern and efficient foreign steelmakers...

...Indian ethnic identity hinges on rights to communal land - and, as elsewhere, this runs smack into national "development" plans be they of left or right...

...So far, it's driven 70,000, mostly Indian refugees, into Mexico with no end of horror stories...

...Every morning before coffee break, he moves around a few million dollars, taking advantage of decimal points...

...All of this confronts the AFL-CIO's Lane Kirkland, George Meany's successor, with a giant challenge...

...Making Indians martyrs of counterrevolution will only turn them into pariahs in their own country...

...They state baldly what seems to be an operating principle throughout this whole affair: that a different law should obtain for big corporations than for the rest of us...

...Despite this fact, U.S...

...After Somoza's ouster, the Indians cautiously embraced the Sandinista government as it gave political recognition to Mis-urasata, the Indian organization, provided agricultural aid, and a bilingual literacy campaign...

...Nowhere did the steelworkers win...

...other labor giants besides the Steelworkers are in trouble...

...And we had read that, despite these findings, the top officials of the SEC had decided to take no further action in the case...

...Or is the president's defense of Indian rights simply under wraps in the rest of Latin America...

...Steel came up with $6.3 billion in its effort to buy the Marathon Oil Company...

...In 1975, its top officials approved a system of keeping two sets of books and conducting unrecorded or disguised transactions so as to hide the real character and extent of its currency dealings from government authorities...

...The threat of U.S.-sponsored covert operations through surrogate paramilitary groups, now confirmed, lends substance, moreover, to the Sandinist fear of invasion...

...Union membership stands at 20.9 percent of America's work force, as against 25.5 in 1953...

...And to make matters worse, the outlook in the steel industry itself is not bright...

...they were "insignificant" (several millions in tax dollars...

...du Pont de Nemours & Company, predominantly in the South...

...Sandinistas obviously fear that "dirty tricks" will inflame modest Indian resistance into full-scale revolt...

...We had read that the enforcement staff of the SEC, after a three-year investigation, had concluded that Citicorp, America's second largest bank holding company, had been shifting currency around the world in illegal ways so as to avoid paying the proper taxes on $46 million or more in profits...

...President Reagan used his Carribbean Basin speech to flaunt Nicaragua's harsh relocation of 8500 Miskito Indians...

...Reagan's policies intensifies even further...

...The overly scrupulous employee was fired...

...or rather, no, we hadn't...

...In one New Jersey plant, for instance, the vote was 165 to 32 against the steelworkers...

...Not to be outdone, Secretary Haig flourished a photo of burning bodies - which turned out to date from the Somoza era...

...Labor's heyday is definitely over...

...Labor is already the major financial resource for the Democrats...

...Ronald Reagan succeeded in breaking the air controllers' union, and givebacks of previously won benefits are becoming standard employer demands in industry after industry...

...How can the union deal with such corporate conduct...

...Kirkland will have to make a lot of changes if he is to breathe new life into organized labor...

...Nor is the problem confined to small and struggling unions...

...The 165,000 Miskito, Sumo, and Rama Indians of Nicaragua's isolated Atlantic coast region are mostly devout Moravians suspicious of any government sitting in Managua...

...Kirkland will try to reverse...

...We've been pondering the whole story ourselves for several weeks now...

...Official policies of ethnicide are called "emancipation" or "incorporation into the market economy...

...in fact, by clandestine radio, he regularly urges his fellow Miskitos to rally behind the cause of an imminent invasion...

...Even the aggressively muscular Teamsters have accepted a contract that will freeze their wages and benefits for at least two years...

...State Department are actually lost members of the notorious Libyan hit squad...

...To the government, this has cast doubt on the good faith of other Misurasata leaders...

...These ominous developments, about which little has yet been clarified, may eventually overshadow all other reports from Nicaragua...

...Had we read, he wanted to know, the news story about Citicorp and the Securities and Exchange Commission...

...Turning the tide of labor's fortunes will take time, in part because the rank-and-file are not yet ready to consider new approaches, as demonstrated in the widespread initial reluctance to accept even a start at a new beginning in the UAW-General Motors bargaining...

...violating tax and exchange laws doesn't necessarily make "a bad corporation...

...In Florence, S.C., the vote was 467 for no union and 197 for the union...

...The organizing squeeze is by no means confined to the United Steelworkers, which is in better shape than many other unions...

...For that matter, why single out the Nicaraguans...

...These SEC officials also argued, according to documents used by the commission, that Citicorp's pursuit of profits it knew to be probably unlawful was 'reasonable and standard business judgment.' " Read those last two paragraphs again...

...After a protest, that move was postponed until a study of Indian land claims could be made...

...That is, we had started the story...

...Their second language is not Spanish, but English...

...Most were released within two weeks, but the damage was done...

...At plant after plant across the country, the majority favoring no union or the independent worker associations favored by Du Pont was overwhelming...

...mining and lumber companies, now gone...

...This is not the kind of thing that daunts our friend, however...

...Citicorp's maneuvers were "old" (1973-1980...

...Read the continuation," he advised us conspiratorially...

...And the disbanding of Misurasata...

...Amnesty International has documented hundreds of assassinations, massive political arrests, torture, and persecution of the Katio and others there...

...Nor are the union troubles confined to a few industries that are suffering from import problems or the economic downturn or both...

...The AFL-CIO still represents fifteen million workers, and its power is not to be sneezed at...

...citizens have realized that an artifact is no substitute for a living Indian culture...

...But it's difficult to avoid the impression that loose talk and deliberate provocation from Washington have contributed greatly to the antagonism...

...Returns tabulated by the National Labor Relations Board showed that the steelworkers' union was beaten badly...

...But we may never know whether the SEC staff memorandum is, in fact, accurate...

...So it went in plant after plant...

...The Sandinistas reply with denials and say that they've got a border war on their hands...

...plans of aggression...

...At just the time when a growing number of U.S...

...No doubt unions will continue to suffer hard times until the political-economic climate changes and until their new directions are clear...

...International public concern is warranted...

...All this was on page one...

...In his last years George Meany was not particularly flexible or imaginative, and he ran labor affairs with a heavy hand - something much resented by younger men...

...The Sandinistas must answer for their harsh measures...

...Gains have been made in government and teaching...

...If we had shied from pursuing the story into the bowels of the business section, perhaps it was only the numbing effect of certain detailed explanations...

...Nonetheless, employers might be wise to restrain their giveback demands and curb their anti-union tactics...

...Membership in the historic International Ladies Garment Workers has dropped more than one-third since 1967...