Datelines
Hornblum, Constance Matthiessen, Andrew D. Basiago, Bill Lueders, Roberta Penn, Carole and Paul Bass
DATELINES Of Cloth and Steel PITTSBURGH At daybreak last July 3, a small group of men and women gathered at the gates of the Dravo Corporation, a construction company near Pittsburgh, to protest...
...In response to the desperation, the Ministry was formed in 1980, with the support of various Protestant denominations...
...But last October he quit his job at the General Dynamics Electric Boat plant here, just hours after the man working beside him dropped dead of a heart attack...
...We met with politicians, we met with business leaders...
...Since plant closings and layoffs swept the region in late 1981, the unemployment rate in steel and related industries has skyrocketed...
...The INS went to the management of Racine Steel, seeking to have the arrested employees fired...
...How Do You Spell Relief...
...Activists have also disrupted church services attended by executives from Mellon and the U.S...
...But it is the cruelty of our society that you can destroy people's lives and do it quietly, so no one pays attention...
...The campaign for assistance began in the fall of 1982, when homeowners started to feel the full brunt of the recession...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) rounded up twelve undocumented workers in a raid at Racine Steel Castings...
...In some states, union trustees have taken steps to ensure that such funds are invested in unionized endeavors...
...We attacked people instead of ideas...
...But he says the union's stance has been a source of hope "not only for me but for all the workers...
...Chuck Ashbaugh, who was in charge of the reactor's daily operations, had thought "the university would not wimp out...
...Sixteen of the seventeen are Mexican-bora, and all had been employed at the plant for at least five and a half years...
...It was an eighteen-month struggle...
...Most of the clergy involved in such actions have been reprimanded by their superiors, and church funds for the Ministry have been withdrawn...
...There's no question in my mind that certain people in Washington are trying to seduce blue-collar votes with this kind of move," he says...
...Fought says the Reagan Administration uses the raids to affix blame for unemployment on immigrant workers rather than on its own policies...
...Adamson acknowledges the possibility of police culpability...
...Many of the victims were young prostitutes, and area women's groups charge that police agencies are dragging their feet because prostitutes were involved...
...This "negative change," says Robert Gasperow, executive director of the Council, "is without precedent in over fifty years...
...In 1978, a young Yale graduate, Andrei Navrozov, and two student friends purchased the moribund Yale Literary Magazine for the princely sum of one dollar...
...Governor Richard Thorn-burgh recently signed a law that provides additional funding for the state's emergency mortgage assistance program...
...I have been on union jobs where the workers were offered a choice between transferring to the employer's dummy business or standing in the unemployment line...
...If white, middle-class college girls were missing or dead," says Cookie Hunt, a representative of the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders, "there'd be an entirely different response...
...Most are, in fact, quick to offer concessions...
...But the unions cannot be depended on to stem the decline...
...Two weeks later they returned to nab five more...
...The Lit, which in its heyzine raised $1 million from right-wing sources, ranging from the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts and Dow Chemical to Malcolm Baldrige and Alfred M. Hunt...
...In Philadelphia, for example, foreclosures increased by 36 per cent between 1980 and 1982...
...Initially, it approached the problem through conventional channels...
...A few tried to enter anyway, and the protesters slashed their tires and threw paint on their cars...
...Often, he returned home sullen and angry and shouted at his wife...
...Until unions attempt to organize everyone who builds, they will be under the hammer...
...We were asking for disaster relief, for some kind of help for unemployed families, and everyone told us they couldn't do anything...
...He has resisted pressure to enlist the aid of the Federal Government, saying it isn't necessary...
...We could treat a suspect who was a police officer in pretty much the same way we would treat any other suspect...
...The group of protesters included about a dozen ministers in full clerical garb...
...That has been suggested a number of times," he says...
...Sometimes the banks would back down and delay the eviction...
...These people have no right under Federal law to be working," Swan argues...
...Cristo Rey Parish put up $2,000 in bond money to obtain the release of one of the arrested workers, Francisco Bias...
...pay reductions for unionized workers therefore drive down the standard of living for nonunion workers as well...
...The demonstrators wanted to shut down the plant for a day, and they told arriving Dravo employees to go home...
...The case for Federal help is bolstered by a disquieting theory circulating throughout the Seattle area: that the killer may be a police officer...
...Andrew D. Basiago (Andrew D. Basiago is a California writer who reports on social issues...
...Allen Hornblum (Allen Hornblum is the research and press director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project...
...Many of the women have been strangled or asphyxiated and there's been no marks left: That points to the police chokehold...
...Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti, who had previously denounced the Moral Majority's intolerance, has been accused of censorship himself...
...They are needed here, and should have a right to residence...
...Task Force had 150 people on it after one year and only approximately ten women had been killed...
...He says we don't like his politics...
...Nonunion wages, though lower, are usually based on the union scale...
...Today, the figure is 30 per cent...
...In late June, armed agents of the U.S...
...They got attention because they were good girls...
...Times are tough in Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley, the steel belt of the country...
...Their new contract stipulates that an employer's subsidiary is covered by the terms of the parent company's agreement...
...Mark ERlich (Mark Erlich, a member of the Carpenters' Union, edits Labor Page, a rank-and-file magazine in the Boston area...
...And I have seen contractors put magnetic signs advertising their nonunion ventures over the painted logos on their trucks...
...These people have proven themselves to be hard workers and also good members of our community," says Gessner...
...The purpose of this type of enforcement operation," says Ronald Swan of the Milwaukee INS office, "is to open up employment opportunities for United States citizens and lawful permanent residents...
...The problem is that until we've caught this person, we do not really know what his background is...
...Howitt, twenty-five, now works for a solar contractor and helps his former co-workers leave Electric Boat...
...Steel Corporation...
...Still, activism has replaced business unionism in some areas...
...Now it's the only state program of its kind in the nation...
...Their group has been battling Pittsburgh's corporate big-wigs for the past two years...
...In rural counties, foreclosures jumped 200 to 300 per cent...
...Roberta Penn (Roberta Penn is a free-lance writer in Seattle...
...It established a fund to provide low-interest loans to applicants who can prove that their mortgage delinquency is no fault of their own and who show excellent prospects of repayment...
...We say he can't...
...And Himmelman, a minister for more than twenty-five years, was dismissed from his position as assistant to the bishop...
...Mailings, phone calls, and visits to state legislators paid off: Last December, Pennsylvania ushered in the nation's first statewide mortgage foreclosure relief...
...The Philadelphia Unemployment Project turned such resignation into resistance...
...At times we had been irresponsible," says the Reverend Wells...
...But as craft knowledge gives way to specialization and pre-fabrication, they are losing influence...
...Since the turn of the century, the building trade unions have been among the most conservative in the labor movement...
...In so-called double-breasted operations, the builder shifts work to a non-unionized company that shares office space and suppliers with the original concern...
...Union officers have also discovered a new weapon: the billions of dollars of pension funds they help control...
...Like some two dozen other campuses, UCLA housed a research reactor that used highly enriched uranium...
...The Green River Flows Red SEATTLE Three years after the terror began, the Green River case remains unsolved...
...Protesters took to the barricades to prevent sheriffs deputies from evicting homeowners...
...Captain Frank Adamson heads the Green River Task Force, a group of forty officers investigating the murders...
...Stand-offs between foreclosure victims and the police became commonplace...
...When we started, nobody gave us a shot for it...
...Members of Pittsburgh's Denominational Ministry Strategy, they are pioneering a liberation theology adapted to America's industrial heartland...
...We're seeing the psychological destruction of a whole segment of the population," says the Reverend Paul Him-melman...
...The people here are like family, and it's tough to see this," United Auto Workers Local 553 President Richard Fought told Racine Labor after the initial raid...
...The Argonaut Flunks Out LOS ANGELES Nuclear power has been expelled from the University of California at Los Angeles...
...We're trying to hold these people accountable...
...That mechanism was the Homeowners Emergency Mortgage Assistance Act...
...But Navrozov, a twentyeight-year-old Russian emigre, is sticking to his presses...
...The combined wealth of our readership," boasts a Lit day published the likes of Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Dylan Thomas, and Thornton Wilder, soon was filling its pages with such bylines as William F. Buckley, George Gilder, and Seymour Martin Lipset...
...Open-shop contractors now dominate the industry...
...We needed a mechanism to solve or at least temper the situation on a grand scale...
...People would hide in the sub and go to sleep...
...Many of these women were known to be armed and yet no attacker has been shot," says an "exotic" dancer called Noreen...
...Two of the men arrested by the INS belong to Cristo Rey...
...In the meantime, contrary to the wishes of the Immigration Service, most of the arrested employees have been allowed to return to the foundry...
...Yale officials were not impressed...
...It soon became apparent that the program's funding was inadequate, so the lobbyists went back to the well for more...
...We did all the nice things," recalls the Reverend Douglas Roth, a young pastor at Clair-ton's Trinity Lutheran Church...
...With Gessner acting as interpreter, Bias spoke of his sadness at having been treated "like a common criminal" by INS agents...
...The national unemployment rate for construction workers began to top 20 per cent, and employers saw an opportunity to weaken the unions...
...In the end, the university concluded that the reactor was not worth the trouble to defend it, and so the plug was pulled...
...As yet, the Task Force has not announced any connection between these murders and the Green River slayings...
...Hotline to GROTON, CONNECTICUT Jim Howitt used to build Trident nuclear submarines...
...The revamped magaadvertising brochure designed to resemble The Social Register, "is equivalent to 3 per cent of America's Gross National Product...
...Instead of relying on social activism, they found clout in holding down membership and controlling the limited pool of skilled labor...
...The once booming mills are limping along with skeleton crews, and more shutdowns may be on the way...
...Fed up with inaction, the religious activists joined local union members to launch the Network to Save the Mon-Ohio Valley...
...We must defend the rights of all union workers," Fought says...
...Radical lawyer John Williams, who has represented victims of police beatings and Government wiretapping, is defending the new Lit...
...They're making the assumption that we have information that would help them," Adamson responds...
...The additional $25.7 million appropriation passed the state legislature with unanimous approval of both houses...
...Twenty-six women have been found murdered and fifteen more are reported missing in King County, Washington...
...Their organization, the Committee to Bridge the Gap, intervened before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, dragging the University through a protracted relicensing battle...
...We see it every Sunday in church—guys out of work, their faces glum...
...He wanted the Argonaut to stay open a few more months "so we could have beat the pants off' the critics...
...In the summer months, however, four prostitutes were found dead in the Seattle area...
...The bottom line is that if he's not caught, there are going to be more victims...
...PHILADELPHIA Economically distressed homeowners have found relief in Pennsylvania, thanks to some old-fashioned grass-roots lobbying...
...The Ministry with Defense Workers represents a new approach to armament workers here...
...In the Pittsburgh area, hastily organized food banks can hardly keep up with the demand for assistance...
...About five years ago, the Business Roundtable, an organization of leading corporate executives, urged builders to reassert the "employer functions of management...
...Others would walk around the yard all day...
...They took the quarterly to court, claiming that the University, not Navrozov, owns the name of the magazine...
...Navrozov thinks he can buy the name," comments Kiang...
...He and local peace activists set up the Ministry with Defense Workers, which runs a hotline providing advice, counseling, and job referrals...
...More than 10,000 pages of legal briefs and an additional 10,000 pages of reactor records were presented to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
...Howitt himself was becoming ill from the work...
...Jamie Beckett (Jamie Beckett is a free-lance writer in Norwich, Connecticut...
...According to Howitt, "the language and attitude at Electric Boat is like something out of a horror movie...
...One man apprehended by the INS had worked at the foundry for twenty-three years...
...Bills were piling up and mortgages were being foreclosed...
...The union's attempts to intercede in behalf of its members have not gone over well with the INS...
...They transformed it into a journal of conservative opinion...
...But there was still work to be done...
...In a monopolistic environment, all standards decline...
...If you think you're being arrested, you're not going to shoot a cop...
...We feel we are supported and that the union cares for us and is going to stand by us in our need...
...Citing the workers' right to due process, the union threatened to file a grievance if the company acceded to the Government's demands...
...So lax was the security that Playboy listed the Argonaut in its "Terrorists' Guide to the 1984 Olympics...
...The local Hispanic community has joined the union in protesting the INS action...
...To ensure passage of the bill, the Project joined a coalition of unemployment councils, labor unions, and religious groups to form the Pennsylvania Foreclosure Crisis Committee...
...The Argonaut's critics also charged that the University could not safeguard the Argonaut's 93 per cent enriched uranium, which they said could be stolen to make an atomic bomb...
...Network leaders say that U.S...
...The last "official" Green River murder occurred some time between last September and March...
...Steel is neglecting to modernize its Pittsburgh plants even as it sinks money into foreign steel mills and Marathon Oil...
...Management lawyers and consultants have devised an ingenious new mechanism for skirting unions: the dummy corporation...
...The raids at Racine Steel were directed from the Immigration Service's Milwaukee office, which claims to have conducted twenty-three such dragnets on industrial workplaces during the previous six months...
...The building trade unions ran into trouble in the mid-1970s when the bottom fell out of the housing boom...
...DATELINES Of Cloth and Steel PITTSBURGH At daybreak last July 3, a small group of men and women gathered at the gates of the Dravo Corporation, a construction company near Pittsburgh, to protest the layoff of more than 1,000 workers...
...Everybody seemed to be laid off or out of work," recalls Project member Al Til-son...
...We're very happy," says John Dodds, director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project...
...People saw the problem and accepted it," says Terry Heckler, an out-of-work truck driver who was supporting his family with public assistance and unemployment compensation...
...In a very sort of curious way, there's more cultural diversity at the highest levels in Russia than here," he says...
...We're concerned about justice," says the Reverend Glenn Gessner of Cristo Rey Parish, a predominantly Hispanic congregation...
...I don't like to see church services interrupted...
...One bridge is the understanding that employees of such companies as Electric Boat need other jobs before they can walk away from the Pentagon's shops...
...We hope people can talk about their frustrations," says the Reverend Peter A. Wells, a hotline organizer...
...About 8,000 unemployed homeowners behind on their mortgage payments are eligible for the loans...
...We hope to start building bridges between the peace community and the defense workers...
...I've never once read the magazine...
...The group was originally called the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable...
...But the administration is losing support among defenders of the First Amendment...
...UCLA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending a reactor that allowed student operators a mere six hours of training each week...
...In the Hillside Stran-gler case, she says, "the L.A...
...Several workers laid off by Dravo have taken their lives...
...A special team within the Task Force is investigating those tips that implicate police...
...Hirsch and Aftergood argued that an accident at the Argonaut could release dangerous levels of radioactivity into the environment, and they buttressed their claims by citing the Argonaut's sloppy operational record...
...In Boston, carpenters took advantage of a building boom to fight the double-breasted system...
...The union has no right to say they have...
...Tom Owens, an organizer for the AFL-CIO Building and ConstruePeace tion Trades Department, defends this practice, saying, "Our only hope is to keep union contractors competitive with nonunion companies...
...On the heels of the Pennsylvania victory, groups in other states beset by high unemployment are trying to win mortgage assistance programs of their own...
...Thorns Among the Ivy NEW HAVEN Universities are supposed to be sanctuaries for divergent viewpoints...
...The Reverend John Gropp, a Lutheran pastor in the small town of Duquesne, is being investigated by the Lutheran hierarchy...
...A management organization has filed an antitrust suit against the union to nullify that clause...
...The hotline is staffed by fifteen volunteers, including Howitt and one man who still works at the submarine factory...
...Constance Matthiessen (Constance Matthiessen is a writer in Washington, D.C...
...The only shred of hope during the investigation came in July, when two inmates in a San Francisco jail claimed to have committed some of the murders...
...Though they are politically conservative," he says, "they are little people being picked on by a giant...
...The controversy was a long and costly one for the University...
...I don't like seeing someone's tires slashed," says Himmelman...
...Hirsch and Aftergood presented "a strenuous, credible challenge," says Roland Finsten, Stanford University's director of health physics...
...I don't think you can insist on a moral basis that people should quit their jobs and stop building weapons," says hotline volunteer Joanne Sheehan, "without realizing they have to feed their families...
...But at Yale University, tolerance has taken a tumble...
...The matter ended up in state Superior Court, and Yale won that round last year...
...The workers have filed for hearings before an administrative law judge...
...Giamatti refers questions to the University's general counsel, Lindsey Kiang...
...Network members have stuffed dead fish in safe-deposit boxes at a dozen Mellon branches (forcing the bank to drill into the boxes to remove the stinking fish), and they doused several offices with synthetic skunk spray...
...But the Task Force has run up a bill of $1.9 million, straining the finances of King County...
...The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had itself criticized UCLA in 1974 for letting radioactive Argon-41 gas be blown onto campus, and for other safety and record-keeping snafus...
...The secrecy, however, angers many women, who urge the police to release any information they have on the killer so that women can better protect themselves...
...It was an understated finish to a vitriolic contest...
...We don't feel alone...
...The employer-financed Construction Labor Research Council reports that contracts for the first half of 1984 contained an average 2.6 per cent decrease in wages and benefits...
...Bill Lueders (Bill Lueders is an editorial intern at The Progressive...
...Eight demonstrators were arrested for trespassing and destruction of property...
...says Noreen...
...It really makes you wonder what the hell kind of a country we're living in...
...The Network initiated a campaign asking customers of Mellon Bank to withdraw their money, asserting that the bank helped undermine the steel industry by shifting investments overseas...
...Carole and Paul Bass (Carole and Paul Bass are New Haven-based free-lance writers...
...For the past five years, community organizers Dan Hirsch and Steve Aftergood waged an intensive campaign against the unit, called the Argonaut...
...Hammer Out Warning JAMAICA PLAIN, MASSACHUSETTS Fifteen years ago, union workers erected almost 80 per cent of new construction projects...
...Soon, the Project adopted a more systematic approach...
...Immigrants Find an Uncommon Friend RACINE, WISCONSIN Some unions would have looked the other way...
...We knew we couldn't keep going as we were, fighting one eviction at a time," says Project organizer Horace Small...
...But the UAW local wouldn't stand for it...
...He was hospitalized for chest pains after leaving the company...
...Carpenters in Southern California struck for four months to win a provision requiring general contractors to use unionized subcontractors...
...Their confession turned out to be a hoax...
...The Argonaut is "no longer of academic benefit to the university," George Turin, the school's new dean of engineering, told UCLA Chancellor Charles Young...
...Their spirits have been taken away...
...Such initiatives are still few in number and protect only those already unionized...
...That's rubbish...
...My concern is, number one, that we catch the person and that we are able to prosecute the person...
...And in the eastern half of the state, Chapter 13 bankruptcies rose by a factor of ten between 1978 and 1982...
...Though the clergy aren't sure their unusual tactics will succeed, they believe there is no other way to focus attention on the plight of workers in the area...
...The findings of this team—and most of the Task Force's leads—are kept secret...
...Incidences of alcoholism and family violence are on the rise, as is the suicide rate...
...in some towns, it hovers around 25 per cent...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 10
