Milk Distribution Should Be a Public Function
Solomon, Charles
By Charles Solomon Milk Distribution Should Be a Public Function QEPUTY sheriffs and militia will not solve the milk problem in the cities of this or any other state. The issue is not...
...Hogan is a natural leader, to whom all of the workers look...
...The issue is not be tween the actual milk producers and the millions of consumers throughout the state...
...Hogan was out of town when this happened on some organization work...
...This Helps Run the Trains on Time All officials in the • .ploy of the German Reichsbahn (State Railways) are required to sign the following statement: "I solemnly declare, after a careful examination of my descent, that there is nothing to suggest that I am not of Aryan origin or that any of my parents or grandparents ever embrace* the Jewish religion...
...For this reason the defense of Hogan, Carter and the rest of these people becomes a national issue of concern to all workers, employed or unemployed...
...Many of the codes show satisfactory progress...
...The personnel of the Commission of Conciliation is on the whole unsatisfactory...
...For example, an item referring to a successful organization drive among the Pennsylvania shirt workers appears in the Communists' official organ of July 13 under the headline "Amalgamated Clothing Official Sells Out 1,000 Shirt Strikers": LEBANON, Pu., July 12.—One thousand strikers of fie Liebovitz Shirt Manufacturing Co...
...They got from two to five days a week work according to the size of the family...
...They will be able with impunity to fire those who fight for their rights, to reduce veteran workers to the status of apprentices and to work all the other tricks I heard about...
...They have placed the blame directly on the giant intermediaries and the milk board dominated by them...
...No one can truthfully deny that machinery has been a great boon to the toilers of the world, yet in a period of distress they turn from it as the source of their difficulties...
...Even, however, if bootlegging under the codes should be reduced to a minimum, it cannot too strongly be insisted that we can't under the codes stand still...
...The cur has, of course, been restored to Hitler's favor...
...The right to strike is vital...
...They are using every trick to beat the codes...
...The arbitration sellout was engineered by Leo Kryzcki, national organizer of the \malgamated Clothing Workers, whose chief interest in the strike is to obtain recognition of the union for the dues to be collected from the workers...
...No administration can do the job without the backing of public opinion and more particularly of well organized unions...
...Discontent is general and the workers are ripe for effective organization...
...Echoing the out-of-date views of the laisses-fairc economists, he goes into ecstasies over the substitution of iron slaves for men and women in industry and sings this theme song to the machine: The machine has liberated millions of human beings from toil...
...ARYAN PURITY Until a few moonths ago Arnolt Bronnen vMs known only as a second-rate German novelist...
...After two months, which he professed to have spent in painstaking research, he gave out a sworn statement declaring that his mother's husband was indeed a Jew, but that she was an unfaithful wife...
...This rhapsody about machinery having liberated millions of human beings from toil will not stand examination...
...It includes two of the greatest open shop employers in the country, and one of the labor representatives, John L. Lewis, is suspected in labor circles because of past settlements and for actions which the rank and file of the miners in many districts have disapproved...
...Not only could they disorganize the unemployed but they could strike a blow at labor organization...
...What is happening there at present sheds a lurid light on the bootlegging being done under the NRA and on the battle being waged to keep genuine organization out of the South...
...Here is the story as I found it on a recent visit to High Point: 'About three weeks ago the unemployed in High Point had the nerve to strike...
...There is no other way of doing justice by the producer and consumer...
...The latter had been obliged to stay in jail for almost two weeks...
...No wonder they are moving so fast—backward...
...The authorities have been forwarned for years...
...The bosses saw their chance...
...If the "Aryan" origin is in doubt the case is submitted to an "expert" in racial matters attached to the Ministry 'or the Interior...
...THOSE who attend our meetings will carry away our point of view if The New Leader is placed in their hands...
...So far as the workers are concerned millions of them have lost their jobs because the employers can get the work done more cheaply by machinery...
...It will require not only economic organization but political organization, and that very speedily...
...Their leaders were promptly arrested on one petty charge or another...
...Human labor is needed less and leu as machine production progresses...
...With difficulty bail was finally found, first for the white workers and later for the colored men who had been arrested...
...This little organization, it may be remembered, came into existence in March, 1932, (through a "left wing" secession (from the Social Democratic Labo/ Tarty, just as similar elemenfs had, in October 1931, formed pie Socialist Labor Party by a secession in Germany...
...A special committee is being formed in New York to help raise funds...
...Dutch Ranks Closing R. K. Van Staal, one of the leaders of the Independent Socialist Party of Holland, has formally withdrawn from its ranks...
...The opposition of the miners, employed by the Frick Coke Company to the settlement of the coal strike is based on some past sad experiences on their parts...
...The bosses are alarmed...
...Of the nine original leaders of the Dutch schism, Van Staal is the seventh to leave it, Boland, Dissclkoen, Edo Timinen, Nathans, Oldenbruik and Stenhuis having taken the same step before him, so that only Dekadt and Schmidt remain...
...Bronnen rose to the occasion and proved that he had the soul of a Fascist...
...The part of statesmanship was to have foreseen and not waited to be overwhelmed, and then to answer with force...
...The milk situation is not a new one...
...In fact, the only persons who have secured freedom from toil by the substitution of machinery for human workers in the production and distribution of wealth are the few who own and control the machine...
...Nevertheless it is not possible for us to stabilize a kind of liberal or progressive state capitalism...
...Then he climbed on the Nazi bandwagon and seemed assured of a career among the brown-shirt janizaries...
...When he got back he gave himself up...
...The second possibility is Fascism...
...America has made progress since the dark days of last winter in hope and ability to act and in setting up machinery which labor ran use to go farther...
...The sore spot is the great intermediary companies between the farmer and the city consumer— giant organizations that dominate the situation and exploit the producer and consumer of milk...
...Larry Hogan, the dynamic organizer for the FullFashioned Hosiery Workers, and Beulah Carter, who has done a fine job for the hosiery workers in Durham, stepped into the situation to give a little encouragement to the strikers...
...Under production carried on solely for the private profit of those who own industry the workers receive practically no benefits from machinery and the only freedom from toil which millions of them do receive as the result of machine production is the freedom to live as best they can on the starvation rations doled out to the jobless by public and private relief organizations...
...A considerable portion of the world army of 30,000,000 unemployed workers whose feet now pound the pavements in every country looking for employment, are jobless solely because those who own and control industry have installed iron machines to take their places...
...You can't hide anything from these clever Communists...
...The first of these is chaos within sixty to ninety days—or at most six months—if the increase in prices or industrial output exceeds the ipcrease in re-employment and in money paid out in wages and therefore in effective demand...
...They don't like the code either in textiles or in furniture making...
...By Norman Thomas * The Story of High Point-What Some Employers Are Doing to NRA IIIGH POINT, North Carolina, is one of the * ' industrial citiea in that great industrial ares known as the Piedmont...
...Attention was called, however, to official records showing that his father was a Jew, and he fell into disgrace...
...The men went back to work only on assurances by Edward McGrady of President Roosevelt's personal interest in their rights...
...A local company union in the seamless hosiery industry turned against the bosses and gave them a real battle...
...Without in the least impugning the good faith of the administration or its own belief in democracy rather than dictatorship, I insist that there, are three possibilities and only three possibilities ahead of us...
...I wish I could tell you all the stories I heard in the few hours I spent in High Point...
...I am perfectly aware that if I have not spoken the truth I ahull be liable to disciplinary measures which may result in dismissal...
...They woke up Beulah Carter about one o'clock in the morning to arrest her...
...They persuaded their police department to order the arrest of fifteen persons, nine white and six colored, for trespass and for inciting to riot which never occurred...
...For labor to give up the right to striko is to invite this danger, especially when its renunciation of its right to strike is not better safeguarded and compensated than it is in the present agreement...
...that some nine months before Arnolt's birth she had a Christian paramour, and that he, the said Arnolt, is undoubtedly a simon-pure Aryan bastard...
...Most strikes—not necessarily all—at the moment are inadvisable...
...editor of tho Washington Post is greatly worried over the provision in the law appropriating $3,300,000,000 for public works that human labor instead of machinery shall be employed wherever practicable...
...They are allowed a short respite, for signing this statement, and those unable to do so are required to fill out an extensive questionnaire regarding .he descent of their parents'and grand-parents...
...They were getting 80 rents for a six-hour day for hard unskilled labor—some of it ought to have been classified as skilled—on the municipal golf club and elsewhere...
...Of course, the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers are interested...
...If the bosses and the police can get him in the chain gang they know that they will have labor back in chains no matter what may be the nominal terms of the codes...
...DISCOVERED AGAIN...
...For some timevtherc was talk that these two partieftcs, together with the Jewish Socialist Bund of Poland and the Independent Labor Party of Great Britain, would launch n miniature "Fourth International" and invite so-called leftwingers in other countries to secede from their respective parties and join them...
...In Holland and elsewhere, while the seceders accomplished nothing in the way of advancing their own professed aims, they did, by creating an atmosphere of doubt and distrust, give substantial aid and comfort to the reaction...
...All that the dairy farmers are asking is a subsistence return for their labor and product...
...At no time have the milk producers sought to hold the consumers responsible for their difficulties...
...returned to work Monday in the Reading, Pottstown and Myerstown mills of the company, with promises of arbitration of their wage demands...
...The obvious intention of the prosecution is to get Hogan and Miss Carter and by removing them to cripple indefinitely the organization not only of the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers but everybody else in this area...
...A North Carolina Defense Committee is, as I write, being formed to handle the case...
...If it is important to enable the cities of the state to build homes for the poor, if it is important to enable the cities to generate their own electric power and distribute it directly to the consumer at as nearly cost as possible, it is no less vital to have public distribution of milk, through state and city agencies...
...This in the summer heat...
...Thj present agreement does not even guarantee absolutely labor's right to be represented through its own union...
...Three or four of them in a cell measuring 6 feet by 4 with only two bunks, without light or direct approach to the air...
...I believe the administration is sincerely anxious to eliminate the bootlegging which, if not eliminated, threatens this entire plan to raise wages and increase employment...
...The story of High Point can doubtless be duplicated all over America in many of its details...
...The moment may change...
...The encouraging possibility, of course, is that labor will use the machinery that is set up to establish a new society free from the curse of exploitation and from the division of wealth to absentee owners...
...that is, a situation in which the politics and emotions of Fascism will be added to the economics of state capitalism...
...Liberating the Workers from Toil 'J'lir...
...Extravagant salaries are paid to officials distributed throughout these companies, in some of which dividends as high as 40 per cent were paid in 1932...
...We have no time to lose...
...They operate not only directly as distributors, but through a network of collateral companies, such as realty and holding company organizations...
...they know everything, even your motives...
...In the meanwhile the* Emergency Committee for Strikers' Relief, 112 East 19th Street, New York City, of which I am chairman, will ba glad to transmit funds for this all important defense, in which are involved directly or indirectly the question of unity of workers, unemployed or employed, white or colored, and the right to organize and strike...
...This is the Socialist goal...
Vol. 16 • August 1933 • No. 6
