The Daily Worker Newspaper, December 30, 1927, Page 6

os | WORKER : 4 hed by the NATIONAL DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING ASS’N, Ine. et oa Daily, Except Sunday 83 First Street, New York, N. Y. Cable Address: “Dajwork” bie SUBSCRIPTION RATES | By Mail (in New York only): By Mail (outside of New York): _ $8.00 per year $4.50 six months 6.00 per year $3.50 six months $2.50 three months. $2.00 three months. Address and mail out checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 33 First Street, New York, N. Y. fags) Miter... ....--. -.... chiptes<iavins v0, 058 ROBERT MIN Butered as second-class mail at the post-office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. | Phone, Orchard 1680 | OR NE The Coal Strike and Negro Workers-The Tactics of the Coal Companies | The depression in the steel industry which has brought pro- | duction down to as low as 60 per cent of capacity has been and is being used by the coal companies in Ohio and Pennsylvania especially to force Negro workers into the position of strike- breakers in the mines. Not only are jobless Negro steel workers in Pittsburgh and other cities being recruited for struck mines but there has been an importation of Negro workers from the south for this purpose. The Negro workers in these mines are held in what is vir- tual peonage, according to union officials and others who have made as close a survey as can be conducted under conditions where the coal companies, the state government and the Pennsylvania police forces have united to prevent any extensive knowledge of | the peonage system becoming public. Most of the Negro steel workers who have been in the dis- trict for any length of time stay but a few days in the coal mines. | They are better acquainted with laws and customs and labor con- m=. ditions and can not be intimidated as can the Negro fresh from | \ the south. But for the Negro workers who have just come into these | territories there has been set up a system which has been copied | closely from the contract labor and peonage schemes of the south- ern convict camps and farms. The plan is based on two simple principles: That the Negro worker is allowed to receive just enough wages to enable him to | exist but never to accumulate a surplus and thereby kept in debt | to the coal companies, and second, that being a stranger in a ¢strange land he can be made to believe that if it were not for the | “coal company gunmen he would be torn limb from limb by the} strikers. An extension of this latter principle is to make him believe that the coal companies have a legal hold on him and that any protest will bring him in conflict with the law. : To some extent this is true and there are already on record | a number of cases where the steel trust and coal company local | courts have found pretexts for inflicting substantial fines on | Negro workers who were trying to leave the coal camps. | No extensive figures on the wages paid these Negro workers | available for obvious reasons but some pay checks that have | into the hands of the United Mine Workers and strike relief + .anizers show that after deductions made by the company for t= iasting powder, etc., the hazardous work in the mines nets + as low as $3 per day. n some of the coal camps where Negroes from the south been brought in, the companies have reverted to a vicious | | «etice prevalent before there was a union in the industry—the “setice of issuing “company money” in the form of brass or “iuminum disks which are good only at the company stores. | Lo) The Negro workers are paid with these tokens instead of} ea or check and are therefore absolutely dependent upon the company. Exorbitant prices are charged in the company stores and by this method the wages of these workers are cut still more. Negroes, of course, are not the only workers who have been beguiled into the hell-holes that these mines have become. There are thousands of white scabs but the same conditions are nev inflicted upon them. Furthermore, their situation is far more a matter of their own choice than is that of the Negro workers, - who in many instances have come from the south in answer to lying advertisements and have brought their families with them. The United Mine Workers of America is not one of the mions that has refused to organize Negro workers and there are large numbers of Negro miners in the union. The union is fight- ‘ing for its life and if the coal barons succeed in smashing it in _ the key district of Pennsylvania there will be a reduction of ‘wages and working conditions in the coal camps to the level now prevailing.in those mines where peonage has been established. The United Mine Workers, the most important union in the erican labor movement, can not be crippled without severe ge resulting to all other unions and a still more vicious attack the wages and working conditions of the whole working class— sro and white alike. It is plainly the duty of militant Negro workers to do every- possible to rescue their brothers from the horrible status to th they ‘have been reduced in the open shop Pennsylvania and o mines. Any work in this direction will be of the greatest to the working class and a blow at reaction in one of the industries. There can be little question but that the coal barons are work- toward the creation of a situation where racial prejudice and xd will overshadow the class issues involved. There exists the danger in Pennsylvania especially that coal propaganda will place the blame for the weakness of the upon the Negro workers who are being robbed in the mines, ‘ “are a ‘icult that years will elapse before this work can be done. Wide agitation among the Negro miners in these fields should undertaken at the earliest possible moment. There will be a response, even among those of them who know little of the rv movement, because of the miserable wages and the frightful al conditions under which they are now forced to work. jor General Ely, commander of the second army corps area, rocates a law putting all industrial plants on a military basis they can be turned into munition plants with the least pos- delay. This is reminiscent of the later days of 1916 when the coun- as being adjugted to war—and when war was declared. g to the holiday luncheon of Columbia university gradu- jas in the drive against the Soviet Union, organized because of the |measures under.pretext of “national interests and national honor” of their program of making organization of these workers | } FORWARD AGAIN! “Insurgents? : Go Easy WASHINGTON, D. C., Dec. 29.— | The republican insurgents in congress ‘have failed to secure any kind of sat- \isfactory answer on their program from the republican caucus in the sen- |ate. This was only to be expected. | On the eve of the opening of the |70th Congress, Senators Lynn J. | Frazier, Henrik Shipstead, Robert M. |LaFollette, Jr., Gerald P, Nye and |J. J. Blaine have addressed a letter |to Senator Curtis, republican leader © of the United States Senate, in which \the insurgents “request” definite as- | surance from the republican majority |in congress that there shall be a final | vote in the senate before the adjourn- |ment of the first session of the 70th |Congress, upon the following meas- We've had too many dead and we've got too many maimed... . there are many causes of war today.” Major General Ely did not, so far as we are informed, enum- | erate the ‘“‘many causes of war” but the main cause is the program | of conquest which the American ruling class has adopted and | whose practical application we see in Nicaragua, Haiti, China and | the Philippines. Directly in opposition to the interests of the nfasses of the United States and the countries which have been and are to be conquered, the spokesmen of imperialism work overtime to make these robber expeditions appear gs “defensive measures.” Similarly, as in the world war, when war was declared to pro- tect the loans of the House of Morgan, and as now, when the rivalry with Great Britain is sharpening due to the conflict for world markets and sources of raw materials—notably oil—and, desire of the imperialists to crush the socialist reVolution, and, as in the aid to the Chinese traitors given because they help to rivet the chains of imperialism on the workers and peasants, the impe- rialists speak only of “defense.” & Imperialist wars are in essence an attack on the toiling masses—the rulers of all countries adopt the same suppressive —things in which the workingclass have no interest but which they are driven to the shambles to defend. Statements like those of the secretary of war and of General Ely bring home the fact that the question of imperialist war is not an academic one. The rulers of the United States are organizing for the war that is an inseparable part of their imperialist program. The working class must realize this and organize for re- sistance. Hiram Johnson—Special Pleader for Hearst That the senate committee of five including Johnson of Cali- fornia, Reed of Pennsylvania, Jones of Washington, Bruce of Maryland and Robinson of Arkansas selected for the announced purpose of investigating certain phases of the Hearst forgery stories against Mexico is using its powers to prevent the real facts coming to light is evident by Hiram Johnson’s browbeating of the witness, Frank Y. McLaughlin of Superior, Wisconsin, who has for years been a civil engineer in Mexico. McLaughlin testified that Hearst’s chief forgery agent and broker, Miguel Avilla, was a shady character held in disrepute throughout Mexico by most people who knew him; that Avilla was connected with the American embassy in Mexico, was a former secret spy of the American government and a professional pur- veyor of forged documents. In fact his testimony was devastating for Hearst inasmuch as it showed that this latest broadside against Mexico on behalf of the land and oil thieves was based solely upon the activities of a thoroughly discredited adventurer. Senator Hiram Johnson, who tried to be hangman of Tom Mooney and is to this day responsible for the imprisonment of Mooney and Billings on a frame-up, came to the rescue of Hearst, by asking McLaughlin questions tending to show that the witness was himself an agent of the Mexican government. This is not, the first time that California’s labor-hating sen- ator has acted as attorney for Hearst. On other occasions he drew all his pay from Hearst. This time he draws some of it from the United States treasury. Not all the dirty intrigue of the Johnsons in behalf of Hearst can obscure the fact that the so-called “authentic documents” are fakes, that they were published as part of the agitation of the war-mongers and that they were in perfect accord with the Mel- lon-Coolidge-Kellogg campaign of a few months ago against Mex- ico in order to justify the predatory policy of American imperial- ism in Latin America. Murderers Reap Harvest in Texas The Texas Bankers’ Association, composed of hysterical he- man babbits, recently offered a reward of $5,000 for every dead bandit. They imagined this would so terrorize bandits that bank robberies would vanish from the lone star state. No bandits have been killed, but a number of poor wandering unemployed workers have been lured to their deaths by the sheriffs and police to whom | $5,000 meant a considerable increase over their salaries and the | graft they got through other channels. Two enterprising ‘peace officers,” C. C. Bayes and Lee Smith, lured three harmless Mexicans to wait in front of a bank building on the promise that they would obtain employment. The police- men then rode up and shot them. Two of them died instantly and the third Mexican worker lived long enough to tell the story. The two policemen have been indicted for murder and one of them already confessed that it was a frame-up to collect money. The ‘Brookwood Youth Institute Must Follow Discussion with Action By P. FRANKFELD. The Institute on Youth and the La- bor movement will be held in Brook- wood Labor College on Dec. 30. The institute is the outcome of the arti- cles written by A.J. Muste, chairman of the Brookwood facuty, in the “La- bor Age.” The purpose of the insti- tute is to have a “general discussion on the subjects of organizing young workers; serving their interests in trade-union activity; apprenticeship regulations and training, etc.” Labor Union Endorsement. The institute has the endorsement of the New York Central Trades and Labor Council and other labor bodies. The New York Central Trades and Labor Council is the largest central body in the American Federation of Labor, and claims to represent 750,- 000 organized workers. Some of the discussion leaders are to be: A. J. Muste, director; F. Mahoney, Build- ing Trades Apprenticeship School, N. Y.; W. Smith, secretary-treasurer, American, Federation of Full-Fash- ioned Hosiery Workers; J. Schloss- berg, Amalgamated Clothing Work- ers; A. Shiplacoff, Leather Goods Workers; T. Tippett, United Mine Workers; Umstadter, Printing Press- men; Rose Schneiderman, Saposs, Budish, Spencer Miller, Jr., Fannia Cohn, ete. An Impartial Gathering. With the Central Trades endorse- ment, and such “substantial person- ages” as will participate in the discus- sion—it is evident from the start that this institute is a “kosher,” one from the A. F. of L. standpoint, and that the conclusions drawn at this insti- tute will be of a far-reaching charac- ter both for the unorganized youth and for the A. F. of L, itself. A Step in Advance. The calling and the holding of the institute sessions is a step in advance for the American Federation of La- bor. True, it was inspired and or- ganized by Brookwood, but the fact remains that even the labor append- age of Tammany Hall, the Central Trades and Labor Council, was forced to recognize and endorse it. Organizing Young Workers. But from this discussion—we ex- pect concrete results and recom- mendations for the entire labor move- ment. We want the delegates to re- turn to their respective trade unions with an understanding of the increas- ing role and importance of the youth in industry, of the basic necessity of organizing the 11 millions of young workers, or a majority of it, to the American labor movement. Special Methods Needed. They must be informed that special ways and means are required to or- ganize the youth today. They must be taught to utilize the methods of the powerful capitalist youth organi- zations such as the Y. M. C, A., Y. W. C. A, Y. M. H. A., ete., which have enrolled tens of thousands of |young workers in their ranks. It is ‘very necessary that industry by in- dustry should be discussed and recom- mendations made. Not every indus- ‘try, of course, but those having a large number of young workers, such as textile, metal, mining, ‘needle, building and food. Youth Conferences. ; On special ways and means of or- ganizing the youth, the first that should be proposed is the calling of youth conferences in each of the large eastern cities; New York, Bos- ton, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Pitts- burgh. While youth institutes are all right in their way and discussion is necessary, yet the institute should be followed by the calling of a youth conference. The youth conference: should be called by a “Committee fol Organising the Young Workers” comprising the local unions involved | of organization. Shop committees should be formed either openly or se- cretly according to necessity. The delegates to the youth conference are to represent these shop committees. New Methods, On the question of utilizing new methods of attracting to and making attractive the trade-unions to the working-class youth, it is necessary to introduce social evenings—aye, dances; arrange for lectures on in- teresting and vital problems of the day; to organize sports clubs—base- ball, basketball, and soccer teams, and wherever possible, pool-tables in the local headquarters; in a word, turn the trade-union from the dull, drab affair it is today into an interesting and living institution for the youth to belong to. Muste’s Proposal. We_presume that Mr. Muste will propose his “Labor Youth League” as the form of organization for the young workers in the trades-unions at the institute. According to Mr. Muste, this will be the youth auxil- iary of the trade-union, and is adopt- able to the labor movement just as it is to religious, charitable, and po- litical organizations. ber of Labor Age.) Oppose Special Leagues. We are decidedly opposed to the formation of any youth labor league. We do not think that in the economic organization of the working-class, the trade-unions, where the interests of the adult and young workers are iden- tical, will this auxiliary form of or- ganization be for the best interests of the young workers or be conducive to- wards establishing a solid front of labor. (See July num- No Separations. The division of adult from youth worker on the basis of age will create a separntism between the two in the trade artificial division of the work- ing-class—what is necessary” for American trade-unions is opening wide its doors to the unorganized workers, to the Negroes, and women, and young workers on the basis of equality with the organized. In opposition to Muste’s proposal we offer and will fight for the ad- mission of the working youth into the trade-unions with equal rights and privileges of the adult worker. Right Wing Purposes. A few words about Shiplacoff, Schlossberg, and Sigman & Co,’s sudden interest in the youth problem. Shiplacoff, and Sigman, American so- cial-democrats, unlike their European brethren, never paid any attention whatsoever to the young workers. The youth was no problem to them until they awoke one fine morning to face the militant young workers in the Furriers’ Union, when they tried to crush the left-wing ieadership in the Furriers. Now their main con- cern is not to organize the youth, but rather to prevent the left-wing from spreading its influence over consid- erable sections of young workers. Some Examples. Witness the case of Paterson, N. J. About 500 young white goods workers went out on strike. After the first week, the strike was taken over by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Lack of interest of the right wing leadership, lack of support, and lastly, lack of militancy and policy caused the strike to fail. This was a year ago. The Metropolitan Case. Take a more recent example. The campaign of the Bookkeepers, Ste- | federal courts to issue injunctions. | vestigation of the policy of the United ‘afederal courts to issue injunctions in ures: 1. Adequate farm relief legislation on the basis of the McNary-Haugen bill, to be reported from committee on or before February 1. 2. A bill to limit the power of the 8. A resolution for a thorough in- States in Central and South America. Replying to this “request” of the insurgents, Senator Curtis pointed out that “the chairmen of the three committees which would handle the measures and the insurgents’ program are all members of the insurgent group.” 3 Not Satisfactory. This reply, which constituted in fact a fejection of the request of the in-. surgents, failed of course to satisfy the latter. Consequently, the insurgents ad- dressed another communication to Senator Curtis in which they reiter- ated their request for a vote on the three measures of their program, and proposed: that “In order that we may be assured that the committees to which these measures will be referred will report upon them to the senate, we request that you obtain an assur- ance from the republican members of the foreign relations, the judiciary and the agricultural committees that they will assist in reporting to the senate the three measures mentioned above.” Caucused On Rebels, ‘ The proposal for are investigation of the course of the Coolidge admin- istration in Nicaragua drew forth a reply from the republican senatorial caucus that the republican regulars were not going to sanction “an at. tack on the conduct of our foreign relations.” “Assault On Courts.” i The second proposal of the insur- gents, to consider a bill forbidding the labor disputes, brought forth the an- — swer from the senatorial caucus that this proposal constitutes “an assault on the courts and that the republican regulars “cannot stand for that.” As for the third demand, which called for consideration of the farm relief pro- gram with the McNary-Haugen bill principles, the republican caucus took* the following position: They told Senator Nye that there would be farm legislation and that the whole subject would have a thor- ough airing. But, according to the report in the Times, the republicans “would not make any promise that committed them, even by implication to the principles of the McNary- Haugen measure.” The upshot of this caucus was an instruction to Senator Curtis to con- tinue his negotiations with the insur- gent group. Practically Surrender. As a result of the negotiations which Senator Curtis *carried on with the insurgents, the latter seem to have surrendered completely to the republican machine, to the extent of assisting the regular republicans to organize the senate and to gain con- trol of it. Prove Insurgents Fail. f The farmer-labor movement of the northwest, as well as the labor party movements among the industrial workers, are thus given an oppor tunity to convince the masses workers and poor farmers, who have illusions as to the ability of the “progressives” in congress to do something for them, that these insur- gents cannot be relied on to lead the militant struggle for the interests of the exploited masses, and that the only solution in the présent situation is the further and more intensive de velopment of the’ movement for ® labor party, bs eee mit them to unionize his empl . What is needed more than pared ben in organizing, especially the youth, is audacity and militancy, and these the right wing do not possess because of their class-collaboration policies and legalistic frame of mind. The Main Task. We say: From discussion into ac- nographers and Accountants’ Union, lead by Bohn and Bright. About 9,000 young clerical workers are e ployed by the Metropolitan Life surance Co, The average wage in a given locality, or by a special real culprits are the bankers who incited the murders by promise of rewards for dead men. | A new method of reducing the number of unemployed has been found that may help Mellon and Hoover and the rest of the gang at Washington maintain the illusion of “Coolidge pros- s where Nicholas Mufray Butler was the guest of honor.” perity.” youth committge established by the central labor body. Shop Committees and Literature. Youth literature can be issued for the various factories and should be written in sin beginners was $12 a week with | only 40 tivity. From the Youth into the Youth Conf narrow American F bor representi r