In The World of Labor
In the World of Labor BIG SIX VOTES TO REJECT CUT PROPOSED BY BOSSES Vote 4,366 to 2,894 Not to Accept, but Vote Alto Goes Against Proposed Strike. DV the decisive vote of 4,366 to 2,894 the...
...The tobacco hand workers, no longer allowed to express their creative urge in artistic cigars which connoisseur smokers prized highly, were turned out into the streets to starveI Machinery ordinarily turns out perfect products, yet it Is a curious fact that tobacco is the glaring exception to this genersl ruts...
...In days gone by—and not so long, either—the tobacco induatry was operated by small capitalist owners...
...15,714 or 63 per cent were due to cuts and lacerations, punctures and burns and scalds, indicating a rather general failure to use goggles on work where their use was imperative from a safety standpoint "Without doubt, eye protection devices would have prevented a large percentage ef this tremendous number of eye Injuries...
...J. de la Grant...
...Superintendent of Safety and Hygiene of the State Industrial Commission, in his report on the number of accidents during 193 L After a careful analysis of the 171,7(18 cases which came before the Industrial Commission during the year, Mr...
...for they are the flowers of tradition, the descendants of a long line of progenitors proceeding from Havana who have followed and perfected the trade from generation to generation...
...Thousands of our workers are unemployed and driven to beg a crust of bread to deaden the pangs of hunger, and their pitiful barefooted children clad in tattered rags trot breakfustless to school every morning...
...The backbone of our city's prosperity is undoubtedly the tobacco industry, and the men and women who earn their living employed in the specialized sections into which a modern cigar plant Is subdivided are not merely flesh and blood machines but skilled artists who take greet pride In their handiwork...
...Reports made to ths Milwaukee county board's committee on institutions revealed that many children are kept from schools because of lack of clothing...
...Transplanting the Trust Factories So with suave diplomacy they started to transplant the trustowned factories to Trenton, New Jersey, where labor Is proverbially cheap and abundant, and where machines can safely displace human beings...
...The rejection of the proposed wage cut came in spite of the recommendation of the officers of the International Typographical Union that the new terms be accepted...
...Of the 29,331 eye injuries...
...Safeguards Aro Inadequate "In the accumulation of the tremendous total of accidents to Ohio industrial workers last year, it is certain that inadequate safeguarding and ignorance of or refusal to employ adequate safety methods made a heavy contribution...
...So it would appear that It is up to the county to take action...
...At s meeting of Blx Six, President Charles P. Howard of the International Typographical Union urged the printer* to yield to the employers' demands, saying that under the circumstances it was all that could be obtained...
...11,172 fractures, 2B,179 sprains and strslns, SIS dislocations, 191 asphyxiation!, 6 drownings, and 16,099 unclassified...
...Ths trusts, however, decree otherwise...
...By Mrs...
...Why can't we control snd direct these blind forces...
...Private relief agencies say they can no longer.furnish clothing because of lack of funds...
...Their purpose is to create a prejudice In the minds of the unthinking multitude by leading them to believe that hand-made cigars are unhygienic...
...T/tae newspaper publishers had also demanded a reduction in waxes, but the new agreement awaits the outcome of arbitration proceeding's...
...they built up Tampa...
...Their sons and daughters can no longer do so...
...Mr...
...Everybody knows that machinemade cigars are an abomination...
...Efforts are being made by the officials of Typographical Union No...
...The outcome oi the referendum showed that the members of the union were opposed...
...Night workers would have had to take a ceive S66 instead of 9*8 for a forty-hour week...
...of Syracuse, comes to bat with 4 subs...
...It dares not protest against these Shylocks who exact from helpless, terrorized creatures the pound of flesh and the ounce of blood...
...The logical conclusion is that employers must provide a more far-reaching mantle of protection for the physical welfare of their employes snd that Ohio workers must increase their safety consciousness snd adhere more rigidly to the principles of safety practices In Industry...
...Workers in New York, are witching with close interest the efforts that the printers are making to preserve their wage scales and union conditions...
...43,201 Fingers Injured "Of the 171,768 cases coming before the Industrie...
...Isn't it time for human Intelligence, for human reason to take ths reins In hand...
...DV the decisive vote of 4,366 to 2,894 the membership of Typo *^ graphical Union No...
...6 refused to accede to the demand of the employers that they accept a wage cut...
...Foot and Toe Injuries Inexcusable "The number of foot and toe injuries is equally Inexcusable, when it is considered that 14,20(1 or more than 90 per cent of all foot and toe Injuries, were attributable to burns and scalds, cuts and lacerations, crushes and bruises,fractures and punctures, any one and all of which are largely preventable by the use of available devices for foot protection, even with all due allowance being made for failure of the human element...
...Hitherto the board has limited its distribution of clothing to shoes...
...pOLUMBUS.—The responsibility of employers for the tremendous number of workers in Ohio injured in industrial accidents was emphasized by Thomas P. Kearns...
...We know that the human race is in the grip of the relentless forces of evolution, but why should necessary changes demand so many crushed and broken lives, so many pangs of anguish, so many tears snd broken hearts...
...The cases included 666 traumatic amputations, 10,861 burns and scalds, 33,369 crushes snd bruises, 249 concussions, 60,176 eats snd lacerations, 16,396 puncture wounds...
...The Tobacco Center Tampa is the greatest manufacturing cigar center of the world...
...Kearns said, In part: "The statisticians of the State Division of Safety and Hygiene have completed the grouping of industrial accidents in 1931 according to nature of injuries and the result is an array of figures truly startling...
...Because the trusts knew from experience that the cigar workers of Tampa had red fighting blood in their veins they dared not, at the outset, popularize here the starvation-wages machine regime...
...This would have resulted in reducing the rate from $69 for a larger cut, so that they would rew 1 I forty-four-hour week to $50 for ' a forty-hour week...
...the mayor said, "sad I know they are unabls to supply enough clothing...
...Officials of the local union, bowever, had opposed the scale and conditions offered by the employers...
...The office-holders, the politicians, the puppets of law and order supported by money wrung from the people, uphold the oppressors of labor who are rapidly converting once free and proud human beings into servile paupers almost as degraded as the untouchables of India...
...Big fish will est ths little fish, you know...
...It is almost impossible to smoke them...
...Socialist Mayor M. V. Baxter of West Allis confirmed Buech's statement that private agencies are unabls to provide clothnig...
...It is generally believed here that the Communist agitators who posed as noble leaders were In reality instruments of the trusts, who paid them to ruin Tampa's leading Industry...
...We havs a compulsory education law, but poverty has become so abject that children are kept out of school because they do not hare enough rags to cover them...
...My office Is directly over the West Allis headquarters of the Family Welfare Association...
...Then came the trusts and gobbled up most of these small factories...
...Is there • way for us workers T Yts...
...t Various other proposals were made for 8 per cent reductions in day work and 10 per cent in night work...
...The mercenary bourgeois press defends and even flat* tors the exploiters, because it gets their "ads" and that means business and money...
...Children Kept From School By Lack of Proper Clothing I MILWAUKEE, Wis...
...Their attractive and suggestive "ads" In newspapers boasting the largest circulation and in colorful, posters are poisonous darts aimed at the defenseless workers of the hend-made cigar trade...
...the vivid Imagination of Dante could plcturel For almost two years more than one-half of these workers have been unemployed, and those who still work do so on a part-time plan and at such drastically cut wages that it is impossible to sustain a decent standard of living, for even more perversely inhuman than the snake whip with which overseers used to threaten the black slaves of pre civil days is the "spiritual whip of necessity" that the employers of labor hold over the heads of the terrorised wageserfs of both sexes...
...Kearns reached the conclusion that a large portion of the casualties were needless and that employers made a heavy contribution to the number of injured workers by their "Ignorance of or refusal to employ adequate safety methods...
...They Install machinery and condemn men, women and III tie children to the pitiless, hell of starvation...
...Children in my district are so ragged they cannot be sent to school," said Socialist Supervisor Robert Buscb...
...Oh, the poignant' Irony of Itl Can a hungry child learn anything of a constructive naturef An Unwise Protest Last year, at about this time, agitators who called themselves Communists but who really belonged to the dangerous class, "ths social scum" that Marx and Engels mention in the Communist Manifesto, sensed ths dumb misery, the latent revolt of the dssperste cigar workers against the Injustice of our social system, snd swept them into an unwise protest whose only result wss to increase the misery and poverty of the workers...
...There ere hundreds of families m my eity who lack the means to secure clothing for their children...
...A rumor wss circulated that the Communists of New York and elsewhere were inciting smokers to boycott Tampa-made cigars...
...Ths depression hss lasted so long that sll of their reserves are exhausted...
...When big corporations rule supreme only the worship of one God—profits—is allowed...
...Their parents mads a good Uving turning out pure Havana cjgars...
...Cigarmakers of Tampa Crushed by the Machine IN the orchestra of life, the chant * of Labor is always a monotonous moan, vibrant with present misery and terrorised by the dread of a future made sombre by the two unescapable realities of existence— Hunger and Fearl In our beautiful Tampa, a semitropical paradise of almost perpetual summer, there are at present 14,000 human beings dependent upon the tobacco Industry for a living, who are now writhing in one of those Infernos invented by modern Capitalism which not even Once Proud Skilled Work, era Compelled to Tramp Streets Because Industry Thinks of Profits, Not Humanity...
...The men and women who are still working live in terror, for they know that they, too, may be obliged some day to walk the path of dismal hopelessness and despsir...
...Employers Are He!d Responsible For Large Number of Accidents Lack of Adequate Safeguarding Largely to Blame for Injury of .171,768 Workers in Ohio Last Year...
...29,3 Ii Workers Suffer Eye Injuries "An analysis of ths eye injuries clearly indicates the possibility of a heavy reduction in this type of injury...
...To hide this fact the trusts started a clever campaign of malicious propaganda in the bourgeois press...
...On Tuesday afternoon he presented an offer to tht New York Employing Printers' Association to arrange for arbitration...
...Curious Propaganda Can anything be more malignant than this deadly propaganda 1 They use .pseudo-science as a bait for ths Ignorant, for it Is a well-known fact that nicotine is fatal to microbes and to all other contagious germs, and if this were not enough, all factories specializing In hand-made cigars are obliged to comply with strictly sanitary requirements...
...Fred Sander, one of the old reliable...
...They are facing starvation...
...The old contract lietween the union and the New York Employing Printers' Association expire^ on September 30th, and no new agreement has been reached up o the present...
...6 to bring about arbitration with the representatives of the New York Employing Printers' Association...
...It Is not an uncommon sight to meet cigarmakers who have worked ln a factory for mors than fifty years, and who are still able and willing to work...
...The employers also insisted on abolishing* f»e established system of priorities...
...At the same time a vote was taken to determine whether the workers were ready to strike rather than accept the new terms...
...What will lead us out of this Jungle of confusion Is "fiftyfifty" cooperation-Socialism I...
...The workers have indicated however that they will not submit certain questions, like that of the abolition of priority, to be arbitrated...
...Under the rules of the anion, a threefourths vote is necessary, and consequently the vote of 8,622 for a strike and 2,884 againat resulted in the rejection of the strike proposal...
...Austin Hewson, head of the local union, has consistently opposed the opinion of the International officers that the reductions must be accepted...
...During the course of negotiations the representatives of the bosses' association demanded that the workers submit to a reduction In pay amounting to about 17 per cent...
...Commission last year,43,201 show injury to the fingers, 29,381 to the eyes, 23,831 to the trunk, 16,997 to the legs, 16316 to the arms, 14,602 to the hands, 11,832 to the head and face, 10.156 to the feet, and 6,603 to the toes...
Vol. 14 • January 1932 • No. 21
