Report Card

...Race and Labor THE JOURNAL OF INTERGROUP RELATIONS, SPRING 1982 'The AFL-CIO and the Black Worker: Twenty-Five Years After the Merger' by Herbert Hill 2519 Thayer Street, Evanston, IL 60201...

...There's not a very big crowd...

...Military-oriented companies will have an advantage over civilian enterprises in the competition for skilled labor, key components, and rare metals...

...Investigating published RERF data, Stewart found evidence of widespread bone marrow damage in the high incidence of deaths from aplastic anemia, tuberculosis, and other infections...

...Using an analytic program devised by Yale University's Bruce Russett in What Price Vigilance...

...Farmers describe in numerical detail how they can't make enough in a year even to pay off the interest on their loans, and how their expenses increase steadily each year while the prices for their crops remain fixed or decline...

...These two studies examine the destructive effects Reagan's military plans will have on the national economy...

...Alice Stewart Welsh National School of Medicine, Department of Medical Statistics, Health Park, Cardiff CS4 4XN, United Kingdom...

...I thought he was a damn good farmer.' " One thing this report makes clear: Many farmers, large and small, are facing bankruptcies that will disrupt their families, severely damage local economies, and ultimately deal a heavy blow to the national economy, which depends on sales to and from rural America...

...But many of these ostensibly healthy survivors suffered residual disabilities, especially damage to the bone marrow, which is critical in the body's immune system...

...It is a personal story of families beset with hardship and despair because of conditions over which they had no control...

...This special issue of the Journal, devoted to Herbert Hill's critical report, provides a scathing indictment of the civil rights record of the AFL-CIO...

...3.00...

...Drawing extensively on government documents, court records, and independent reports, Hill concludes that "the basic commitment of the AFL-CIO is to the white male worker in a collective bargaining unit...

...2.00...

...President Reagan has his hopes set on spending $1.6 trillion on the military over the next five years, an increase of more than 50 per cent over current levels in inflation-adjusted, constant dollars...

...Neither Jobs Nor Security deals with an arms budget that Reagan never touched, but it—along with The Costs and Consequences of Reagan's Military Buildup— provides a chilling picture of the damage Reagan's military plans will wreak at home...

...The significance of the bureaucratic and racist conservatism of the AFL-CIO, according to Hill, extends beyond race relations and involves the survival of organized labor as a social force in America...

...Marion Anderson demonstrates that the 1980 military budget of $135 billion cost the jobs of more than 1,280,000 women nationwide...

...Unless organized labor transforms itself into a social movement with broad goals and a new conception of union membership that goes beyond dues-payers in a collective bargaining unit," Hill concludes, "it will continue its current decline...

...In addition, most new jobs created by the enlarged military will be confined to skilled technical workers who already enjoy relatively high employment levels...

...Men also suffer a net job loss, though not nearly as severe...

...According to NFU president George Stone, it "does not deal in generalities or endless statistics...

...But military contractors, engaged in capital-intensive production of weaponry, spend less per dollar on labor than other industries, according to the study...

...Heavily documented and well-illustrated with good charts, The Costs and Consequences of Reagan's Military Buildup shows how the military budget will spur inflation by driving up interest rates and the costs of such key resources as skilled labor and vital materials, while failing to relieve unemployment...

...Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been fertile ground for scientists gathering data on the long-range health effects of radiation exposure...

...Deaths which would be least affected by Stewart's "silent forces," specifically cerebral hemorrhages, turned out to be 30 per cent lower than expected in Hiroshima...

...One farmer, commenting on foreclosure actions, remarks: "The usual conversation at the auction sale ranges from 'He tried to farm too much,' to 'He bought too much machinery,' to 'He was a poor manager,' to 'He didn't get his work done on time.' Those old lines won't work anymore...

...The study argues that the ability of American industry, especially high-technology companies, to compete in the world economy will be compromised by skyrocketing military expenditures...

...Most farmers are like me, they can't afford to go, and the conversation goes like this: 'Why did he go broke...

...Alice Stewart, known for her studies linking cancer and low-level radiation exposure, takes to task the findings of the U.S...

...Stewart has found 4,399 radiation-caused deaths among the surviving Hiroshima and Nagasaki population between 1950 and 1974, a figure ten times greater than RERF's estimate of 415 deaths...

...On the contrary, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates repeatedly resisted pressure to eliminate racial discrimination...

...Because people in poor health tended to die within five years of the bombings, those who survived past 1950 were abnormally strong...

...and Japanese government-sponsored Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), revealing that the residual radiation effects of the American atomic bombings have been seriously underestimated...

...NEITHER JOBS NOR SECURITY: WOMEN'S UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE PENTAGON BUDGET by Marion Anderson Employment Research Associates, 400 South Washington Avenue, Lansing, MI 48933...

...However, as this study makes clear, there is more in the field than has met official, educated eyes...

...In a twenty-year comparison of thirteen major industrial nations, the study found that those spending a larger share of economic output on the military tend to experience slower economic growth, a smaller rate of investment, and more gradual productivity increases...

...Only one state—Virginia—ended up with a net job gain because of military spending...

...This figure, Anderson points out, is a net job loss...

...Women are especially hard-hit by the military budget because they tend to be concentrated in occupational categories—services and state and local government—that suffer disproportionately when money is channeled to the military...

...Still, the chapter called "Destroying a Way of Life," though a bit on the sentimental side, does set out the problems in human terms, not just in numbers...

...Stewart's report, based on RERF evidence, reaches new conclusions, demonstrating that the effects of radiation linger not just in cancer and genetic damage, but in permanent injury to the body's protective immune system...

...As a result, RERF scientists looked after 1950 only for radiation-induced cell mutation in the forms of cancer and genetic damage, finding 415 cases of the former and none of the latter...

...Bankers and merchants express their reluctance to do business with farmers who may go bankrupt in a few years, leaving unpaid loans and bills...

...It will be the largest sustained arms buildup in American history...

...Neither Jobs Nor Security gives the lie to the notion that military spending is effective in creating jobs...

...RERF assumed that by 1950 all acute health damage from radiation had ended— an opinion supported by early observations that the survivors' death rate appeared to match the rate in the rest of Japan...

...Hill, former national labor director of the NAACP and now professor of industrial relations and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin, shows how AFL-CIO unions have systematically discriminated against blacks in their organizing practices, collective bargaining functions, and poor compliance with civil rights legislation and court orders...

...49, yearly subscription...

...Futureless Farmers DEPRESSION IN RURAL AMERCIA by the National Farmers Union 12025 East 45th Ave., Denver, CO 80251...

...Persistent discrimination against minorities and women reflects the internal decay of the unions, Hill argues...

...Stewart, however, reports on two "silent forces" that distorted the data...

...The military budget cost men about 150,000 jobs nationwide, according to Anderson...

...According to the study, the military might of NATO, including the United States, is clearly greater than that of the Warsaw Pact, including the Soviet Union...

...Other factors were involved, but military spending had the clearest statistical correlation with these negative economic conditions, according to the study...

...Just imagine an auction sale this fall or next spring...

...The Costs and Consequences of Reagan's Military Buildup, written for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and for the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, concludes that such injuries to the national economy need not be tolerated in the name of national security...

...Nonetheless, Depression in Rural America is over-burdened with statistics— because that's the way many of the farmers, bankers, and small business owners frame their problems...

...Here are stories of despair...

...Despite the formal declaration of a non-discriminatory policy, the merged labor federation did not initiate internal changes on racial practices...

...This summary of their testimony is meant to be read as a report on individual lives...

...By job loss, Anderson means the actual number of civilian jobs lost or never created "when people are heavily taxed to pay for the military and are unable to spend the money upon their own needs or upon services provided by their state and local governments...

...Last spring, more than 230 witnesses appeared at nine regional hearings sponsored by the National Farmers Union...

...5.00...

...All the evidence indicates," Hill states, "that each individual affiliate continued the racial practices traditional with that union long after the [1955] merger and that the effect of AFL-CIO policy upon affiliated unions was virtually nil...

...And if it is transformed, the character of a new dynamic labor movement will be expressed most significantly in its active and special concern for the problems of racial minorities and women at the work place and in the community...

...Furthermore, RERF attributed all the deaths in its estimates to cancer, while Stewart draws a connection between A-bomb radiation and fatal diseases other than cancer...

...it takes into consideration the jobs generated through military contracts and salaries...

...Surviving the Bomb JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY AND COMMUNITY HEALTH, JUNE 1982 'Delayed Effects of A-Bomb Radiation: A Review of Recent Mortality Rates and Risk Estimates of Five-Year Survivors' by Dr...

...Direct comparisons between the U.S and Soviet arsenals, both nuclear and conventional, are deceptive...

...For many of the survivors, some bone marrow was replaced by scar tissue, leaving them vulnerable to infection...