The Daily Worker Newspaper, August 13, 1929, Page 4

\ uu eace Four DATLY WORKER, NEW _YORK, JU ESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1929 —— A Rotten Job Is Dirt Shoveling on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Track; Men Are Cheated at Camp (BY a Worker Correspondent) | I was walking up the Bowery | in New York City when I came to an employment agency samed Kane’s Agency. Kane was looking for men to ship up on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Ralroad. I had never worked in WOMEN AS WELL AS MEN SUFFER _ IN PAINT SPRAY Deadly Bicon Snuffs Workers’ Lives By a Worker Correspondent DETROIT, (By Mail).—Many men and women are employed under the most unhealthful conditions in the automobile industry. rible of conditions can be found in ers’ booths in the verue Plant. In this stly Negroes are em- There is a continuous fog department m ployed. of paint th the day, which these men are forced to inhale. Not only is this condition undermining the worke: health, but it involves It was just seore of worl red. The only Profiteering on Workers | _, Respira ators ed the very apest 1, is vieread by. the company. ite of the fact that the com- gets them cheaper because of suying them in large quantities the rs are charged $1.50 in case of theft or These respirators are wholly inadequate to protect the workers from the vapor of the spray gun: Girls Also Suffer From Vapor A number of women and girls work at the end of these booths --tape papering. Much of the vapor passes on to them, and they have nO protection at all from the fumes. | The girls work as long as the , from ten to eleven hours, on both day and night shifts. In the loss. winter time, they suffer from the eold even more then the men. It} {can be plainly seen that meny of the girls are under the required age. “~A large number of women are employed in the press department. They handle heavy sheet iron just as the men and are equally a greasy and dusty. This condition is | true of all Briggs plants and is con- H tinually getting worse. Sanding Hardest Sanding is the hardest job in the plant and pays about 55 cents an hour. Duco sprayers earn about 70 cents an hour. When production was increased recently from 350 bodies to 500 bodies, no change in the work- ers’ pay took place. The entire shop suffers from the “speed-up.” De- partment strikes occur frequently. Only proper organization can con- nect.uv these many little struggles and make them successful in ward- ing off the frequent attempts of the | Briggs officials to lower the wages and worsen the conditions of the workers. The time has come for all Briggs workers, men and women, white and colored, to join the Auto Workers Union and fight! EXPLOITERS PROSPER. PHILADELPHIA, Pa. (By Mail). —The Bayuk Bros, Cigar Co., largest in the world, which exploits hundreds of Negro girl workers pay- ing them less than $12 a week for | an 84 hour week, reports net profits of $420,702 for three months ended June 30. BUILDING STRIKE. | ALLENTOWN, Pa, (By Mail).— Building workers on the high school | building struck here because non- union iron workers were being em- The most hor- | i many more | New Haven before, so I went to Kane’s. We were to be shipped out to Rye, New York. We were told to report at the Grand Sta- tion at 10 a. m., and at 10.30 were sent to the Kane camp up at Rye. We got there at 30 and were each given a nosebag and told to work. The work was hard. It consisted of sifting rock from the dirt from between the rails on the New Haven Railroad tracks. We had to slave 10 hours a day, and were paid the beggarly rate of 40 cents an hour. .We worked from 7 a. m. to noon, then got a half hour for ' Junch, and then worked to 5.30 | p.m. The work was grueling in the hot sun for 10 hours. | We lived at the Kane camp. The Kane agency took a fee of $2 from each of the men it shipped up on the Rye job. (This was re- duced from our pay.) There were about 150 men at the camp when I was there. We were forced to pay 35 cents a meal, or | $1.05 a day for the poor grub we | got. .For the hard work we did, the grub was terrible; there was hing to, hold a man up. This one of the reasons the average only a week, besides the rotten pay. There were 40 men in a house, n was man worked there | who had to sleep in old one cot over another; the place was sure unsanitary. There was a booze joint half a mile away from Kane’s camp, alw wide open. My experience at these rail- road camps is that there’s always a booze camp nearby, often owned ' by the camp owner. This is to get cots, | the men befuddled and keep them | from thinking about their rotten conditions. Altho you are working up in Rye, you don't get paid off there when you quit. Oh no! You have ta come back to New York, and they pay you off at 133rd St. and Wilkins Avenue. A rotten road to work for, the New Hayen. —RED PANTHER, ENGINEERS STRIKE, EAST BARNETT, Vt. (By Mail). gineers on the Connecticut River development here are on strike ‘for better conditions, Duco Sprayers in Briggs Body Plant Ha Another Worker Correspondence Page for Gastonia in Few Days In a few days the Gastonia strikers and mill workers in other Gastonia towns will have another of part are 2 Sp vondence page, in which interesting letters from strikers will feature. Above a new view of the tent colony, against which the mill bosses and the Gastonia Gazette, which they control, g @ campaign of slander. The bosses’ lies about the WIR will be refuted in the workers‘ letters. Slave Day Nea rly Kills LICKSPITTLE OF a Girl in the 5 and 10 Waly Sy, HERE (By a Worker Correspondent) ¢ is vacation time. Hundreds | of tho is of high school girls {| have been let out of school. The; t place the workers’ children | ek employment is five and ten cent stores? Why? Because the five and ten cent store makes no requirements of those working in the stores. If a girl looks a little older than a |kid (that is by putting on high heels | or lipstick, ete.) she is taken on and no proof asked of her age. 15-16 Year-Old Slaves In the store in which I work there are girls of 15 and 16 years of age. The boss—a manager, knows it, but he also knows that he can exploit the | young workers a million times more and thus get more profit for F. W. Woolworth’s. The ges are $12 for a regular week for 51 hours a week. For Sat- urday and part time work 20 cents | an hour is paid. On Saturday the girls must put in| an 11 hour day, from 9 a. m. to} 10 p. (Not counting the extra time and the overtime we have to come in the morning). Not a Raise in 5 Years A girl in this store has been work- | ing for 10 years and hasn’t received | a raise in five years. Now she gets | the maximum for a salesgirl, $16 | |a week. A vacation? After you work here | | @ year you get a week with pay and }ene week without pay. Hot as a Furnace The conditions for a worker in the | store are terrible. In the winter | time we freeze and in the summer time we sweat. We’re sweating now and its hot as a furnace. No fans, no drinks, (try and get a drink, first we must get permission, then we must go down to the cellar and drink i rotten warm water). Then we go} upstairs again and are yelled at be- | cause we stayed too long downstairs | ployed. MINER ASSAILING LIES Fowler of U. M.W. (By a Worker Correspondent) WHEELING, W. Vé. (By Mail). —I beg leave to reply to the un- truthful Mr. David Fowler regard- ing his actions in commenting upon the militant miners’ meeting held August 1 in Bohemian hall, Bellaire, Ohio. These miners were gathered together to make the best of a de- plorable situation in which they had been left by the said Fowler and his dirty clique, which includes the en-| tire United Mine Workers officials | as well as Fowler. The U. M. W. left the miners of this country at the mercy of the bosses by their wholesale betrayal and then the complete sell out of -the miners. They betrayed the same miners whom Fowler attacks. I, as one evar from actual facts denounce article printed in the Wheeling wspaper. I am not out for argu- ments; I am out ior results which ow can not be accomplished by h a non-progressive organization sthe U. M. W. After 30 years of nce I fail to sea pnd it getting a drink. | Slanders Militants bringing a strike to a successful | conclusion, All they ever did was to take the dues and assessments that we min- ers had to pay. We had to take the advice of the so-called representa- tives and go into West Virginia and scab, These misleaders of the U. M. W., these national representatives were all the vime plotting to destroy the union, and this is evidenced by their abandonment of the Jacksonville seale, What do these U. M. W. represen- tatives care about the hundreds of thousands of miners destitute by the hirelings of John L, Lewis, by his appointive power which he would not relinquish after having the same power taken away from him in 1922? He still ruled by that autoc- racy which brought total destruction to the union. Now the National Miners Union is making them squeal because they can not get away any more dues to squander, Support | } | |The girls have to clean the floor Ps suppose many people see chairs behind the counters. These chairs are ornaments for customers to see but not for us to use. We are continually working be- cause at a five and ten cent store it is terribly busy at all times. When we have a lst down on sales we must fill up the counter, order |new sunplies, and stick them in the | closets under the counter and clean | the counters. Can Never Rest Never are we allowed to rest. When another girl goes to lunch we have to take care of her counter and our own besides. These conditicns are true not only | of the stores I work in but of every | store that Woolworth has in the U. | S. We girls in the New York stores inust organize and demand: 1, $20 a week. 2. 40-hour week—no Saturday. 3. Rest periods. 4. Good sanitary conditions (san- itary toilets, and clean lunch rooms). We have a national task because every little city and town in the U. |S. has its five and ten cent store | with terrific exploitation of the girls | | working in them. Unsanitary Conditions The toilets are very unsanitary. with disinfectants. If this is not | done the toilets become terrible. The girls room for eating their flies. We have to eat in these hot rooms because we cannot afford on $12 a week to cat outside. Spy System There is a spy system against the girls. If we try to reason with the floorwalker he calls over the man- ager who fires us. At the end of the day of slavery in Woolworthds five and ten a girl can harly think straight. —WOOLWORTH SLAVE. ‘Symphony Orchestra Musicians Win in Los Angeles, Ca Cal., Strike | LOS ANGELES, A Aug. 12.—“Sym- phonies Under the Stars,” said to be America’s most famous music festival, came to an end quickly on July 30. Musicians of the Holly- wood Orchestra—100 strong—went on strike, protested against a s $3.50 a day, electrician (really a gardener). The musicians won, and @ union electrician is on the job now. In order to break the strike, solo artists were hired, It did not work in this case. In some quarters, strik- ing film actors have been blamed for the stand of the musicians: The strike of Equity, a organization com- posed of stars and “near stars” in the motion picture industry, is still going strong. Equity officials suc- ceeded in stopping “shooting” of scenes in Pasadena the other day. ON WAY TO SLAVERY. ASUNCION, Paraguay (By Mail).—Over 5000 unemployed work- ers from Austria and Hungary are being sent in groups of 100 each to slavery on Paraguan plantations. the union that stands for militancy, the N. M. W. sharks at Haiti te ialhama. Me ¥ MOE Ba They are victi: ‘ed by cmployment and then yy Ameri- lunches is next to the toilets. This | room is in the cellar, over-run with | ‘Marin Not Trusted by) the Toilers | _ We continue the series of letters | from a Porto Rican workers now in New York, He continues to tell of the tricks of Luis Munos Ma- rin, one of the Porto Rican labor misleaders who haye come to New York to fool the Porto Rican work- ers here. Ps. Ce | Now Mr. Marin has turned a pink “liberal,” a disciple of Mencken and ja constant contributor to Villard’s | labor-baiting Nation. Mr. Marin’s vaccilating ways brand him as a first rate opportun- ist and a betrayer of labor, which lis the reason why the workers of | Porto Rico do not trust him. Now Luis has arrived in New York, contracted by the league to write five editorials for their week- ly organ, “El Nuevo Mundo,” one to appear each week, for five con- ‘secutive weeks. The first four ar- and ‘gracious pen of our beloved jhero, dealt mostly with the physiol-| | ogical, ideological and psychological |characteristics of the two most out- | standing figures in the political life |of Porto Rico, A. R. Barcelo, the “honorable” president of our Porto | Rican senate and president of the |near-bankrupt “holy” alliance, and | Senator Santiago Iglesias, leader of the minority group in the senate and president of the “yellow socialist- constitutional party. In other words, it was a character reading of two of Wall Street's ac- credited agents in Porto Rico. In those articles, Mr. Marin tried to explain that both Iglesias and Barcelo were just “like two playful | brothers, good fellows, good citi- |zens, good “dollar” patriots that had embraced the cause of Porto Rico | (meaning Wall St.) with their heart | and soul. But the “catch” was to be found ‘in the last editorial when Senor Ma- | rin makes a heart-to-heart appeal to the Porto Rican people of Harlem jand their so-called “representative” | organizations to come together, | think together, act together and or- ganize into a solid unit that they |may use and exercise their collec- tive influence upon these men, these “gentlemen,” (these hypocrites, these grovelling servants of Ameri- can imperialism) that they in turn should get together, stick together and fight for the same patriotic principles that have always served them, individually, as their guide. In the above, “dollar principles” one should substitute, “patriotic principles.” But can you imagine two of Mor- gan’s lickspittles not sticking to- gether, especially should they be up to a question between the capitalist class and the working class? When in New York City or Wash- ington, D. C., on official or unof- ficial business, it is a favorite pas- time for these imperialist satellites to hobnob together most amicably in the best of hotels and restaurants. Antonio R. Barcelo and Santiago Igle: re both lackeys of Wall St. and, naturally, they eat from the same imperialist plate. But Mr. M: rin's well versed and well paid a: ticles were only a prelude for a pr ranged, portly editorial that fol Tawed. _. (To be ticles that emanated from the keen| PHILA, HOSIERY (Otis tis Skinner t to Return in UNION FAKERS BETRAY TOILERS =. INo Gale for the | Workers from Them (By a Worker Correspondent) PHILADELPHIA, (By The hosiery mill owners, the friends of the leaders of the Full Fashioned ifie campaign to break up the union and cut wages. The misleaders of the union have| always advised the workers to co- operate with the bosses and have! here in Philadelphia sanctioned the| Mitten-Mahon sellout and have been! sever willing tools of the bosses. | Wages Cut, Injunctions, Lockouts. | Today the hosiery workers in Phil- jadelphia are faced with lockouts, |wage cuts, injunctions, ete. At the Mammoth Hosiery Mill all the men} are locked out. Women, cheaper slaves of the bosses are in their] places. An injunction against the |strikers prohibits picketing; the |seabs, recruited from the type of women stand at the win- dows with their fingers at their noses telling the strikers to go to hell, The leaders of the union, if they {really want to win the strike for| the workers must organize these| scabs, ignore the injunctions, mass |picket the mill. Judge is Mill Stockholder. Judge McDevitt, a stockholder in the mills and a labor hater, issued }a most drastic injunction against picketing at the Cambria Mill. This judge was supported by the leaders of the union and the judge true to} |his class, the capitalist class, has jrewarded the hosiery workers who | were betrayed by their officials in |crushing the strike against a big | wage cut. | Union Head Was Mill Boss. | The hosiery workers in Philadel- phia are facing the biggest struggle jin their history. The past president | of the union received $12,000 a year, yet while head of the union was him- |self a mill owner. The officials of the hosiery work- ers union have and still are urging cooperation with their real masters |—the mill bosses. The writer, dur- ing the strike at the Ajax and Federal mills a year ago told of) \the bosses’ plans and exposed the |fakers who sold out the workers in these strikes. Yet today in every mill the work- lers have received wage slashes, in- creased speedup, and lockouts, be-| |cause their officials made them| |follow the policy of cooperation | |with the bosses. Defy the Injunction! The hosiery workers must defy injunctions, must mass picket. The Communist Party is for the workers jagainst the bosses, and the Daily Worker, the paper which fights for the interest of the workers will ex- pose the tools of the capitalist mill owners.. Hosiery workers of Amer- ica, send a delegate to the Trade Union Educational Convention in Cleveland on August 31. Fight to save your union from the attacks of the bosses who hetray you, —wcp 4p The struggle for the new culture goes on in, the country too, and is by no means limited to the towns. “Tanya, the Beer-Shop Wife” re- flects the struggle of village society with the rich peasants, the struggle of the advanced spirits in the village shop. to his list of importations this sea- in London and is doing well. The other importations include “Many Waters,” in which Ernest Truex will play the lead. This is the work of Moneton Hoffe. Noel Coward’s new operetta, “Bitter Sweet,” will have Peggy Wood as star. Greenwich Village boasts of a new theatre. The playhouse is: sit- uated on Grove Street near Bedford and is named Gansevoort Theatre. The first play of the season, “A Noble Rogue,” by Kenyon Scott, will open on Aug -t 15. It is a musical melodrama set in around Ni Mapa of 1812... Mail) —! ry Workers Union, are waging| lowest | hosiery | |for a new cafe instead of the beer- | ARCH SELWYN has added John | Galsworthy’s new play “Exiled,” | son. The production is now current | ILBERT MILLER’S contem- plated productions for the sea- son include at least two companies of “Journey’s End.” One will tour] Canada, and finally make its way to the Pacifie Cc.st. The Chicago company will open in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on *.;tember 6, and then will come to Chicago, at the Adel- | phi Theatre, September 9. The com- pany currently at Henry Miller’s Theatre is expected to remain the] entire season. Katharine Cornell will tour with | “The Age of Innocence” until the new year, when her new vehicle will be ready for her. | Irene Bordoni will make a trans- |continental tour in “Paris,” assisted | |by Louise Closser Ha'> and Irving Aaronson’s Commanders. Of the new productions, the first to come to New York will be “By Candle Light,” adapted from the }German of Siegfried Geyer by P. |G. Wodehouse, with Gertrude Law- rence and Leslie Howard as the | leading players. It will open in Philadelphia in September, prior to the opening at the. Empire Theatre, September 30. The second new production of the season will be Otis Skinner, in “A |Hundred Years Ago,” from the Spanish of Serafin and Joaquin Al- |varez Quintero, with the English version by Helen and Harley Gran- \ville-Barker. Skinner has recently | {played the new vehicle for twelve weeks in Chicago, | The third new production will be that of “Berkeley Square,” by John L. Balderston. The play will fea- ture Leslie Howard and Margalo Gillmore. The last production of the season | j will be “Marius,” by Marcel Pagnol. HE Turcomen Academic Theatre| |* was founded in 1921. Here for | |the first time women appeared on | the Turko stage, where formerly \female roles had been played only by male actors. The theatre finds most of its re- | pertoire among the classics, original | or in translation. This demands | high technical qualifications and} methods of decoration that are new for the Turko theatre. Works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Moliere, Gogol | jand contemporary playwrights such | las Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky | have been given. There are of course very few ori-| ginal plays. :n the first place Azer- |baidjan drama is developing but slowly and in the second place, it Jis difficult to get the old play- |wrights into new lines of thought. |The chief aspirations of the Aca-)| demic Theatre are therefore aimed at assisting the growth of all as- pects of Turk repertoire, answering | |to the demand of the present- day, |i ‘and at finding works of modern} foreign dramatists which shall be at | once ideologically suitable and of ar- tistic value. Among original plays should be mentioned: “The Bride of the | Flames,” “Shades of the Past,” \“Tdine,” “Sheikh Seman,” “Geyaye,” “Olilyar,” and “Gadjay Kara.” The |theatre aims at the cultural service |of the public and a gradual advance ‘from old-fashioned traditions, as {has been done by the Moscow and Leningrad academic theatres. The production of “Hamlet” in the oriental manner and that of “Gor- ky’s “Lower Depths” have been so far the most noteworthy per-| formances. | “Hold Everything” will be given | for the 360th time tonight at the | Broadhurst Theatre. This musical show has been hereabout since Octo- ber 10. 4 Ss. ‘s © sd 6 WATCH This Space for Further Announcements ‘ DOROTHY STONE Who is now playing the role of Dixie Dugan in “Show Girl,” the | George Gershwin -usical play at the Ziegfeld Theatre, NEGRO PLAY BY FRANK WILSON OPENS THIS MONTH Frank Wilson, the Negro actor, who played the leading role in the | Theatre Guild production, of | “Porgy,” is the author of a play called “The Wall Between,” which will be produced here by Jack Gold- |berg. The players include: George Randol, _Susie Sutton, Andrew Fair- | William Edmonson, the only white player, will have the role of a de-| tective. The play may open on | Broadway this month, The Mezhrabprom Film Company, | is issuing in concert with the | Prometheus Company of Germany a} |picture titled “Lawful Marriage,” | an adaptation of Tolstoi’s “Living | Corpse.” The part of Protasov is| being taken by Pudovkin (producer of “The Mother,” “The End of St. | Petersburg” and “The Descendant lof Ghengis Khan.” Other players are Nata Vachnadze and Maria Yakobini and the well known Aus- |trian actor Gustav Dissel is playing | the part of Karenin. The scenes were taken both in Germany and \the USSR, The Soviet Kinematograph world takes an active part in the present campaign against alcoholism. “The Alarm” shows how drunkenness jmakes a worker's producing powers | in the factory decline, and how, |later, after an accident, his ey-s are | f | opened as to his condition, An- other film “The Crooked Line” shows at first the failure of the struggle between the club and the beer-shop, and the subsequent com- plete triumph of the former when the wives of the workers are drawn into club work. ve the “Most # Horrible Conditions Possible NEGRO WORKERS New Quintero Play WORST DRIVEN IN OLD DOMINION Virginia Good Ground -for Real Unions (By a Worker Correspondent) NORFOLK, Va., (By Mail). — I want to give a clear idea of the con- ditions of the workers, thousands of them, in the so-called Old Dominion State, Virginia. The tri-cities, Norfolk, Ports- mouth, and Newport News, form to- day one of the largest shipbuilding centers in the country. There is here one of the largest navy yards in the U. S. It employs 3,500 work- ers, many of them Negro workers. | Low Wages in Shipbuilding, | There are no less than 14,000 worke> : employed in the shipbuild- jing industry in the tri-cities, The overwhelming majority of them re- ceive from 30 to 45 cents an hour. The Negro workers, because of pov- lerty and heavy mortgages on land are being driven to the cities to swell the already large army of un- employed (there are from 7,000 to 10,000 unemployed in Norfolk alone). In Norfolk there are over 60,000 Negro workers living in the worst section of the city, centering around Church, Chapel and Queen | Streets. They slave in the greater part, in the fertilizing plants, of {which there are 33 Portsmouth and Suffolk, 8,000 Fertilized Slaves. The fertilizing industry forms the greater part of the Virginia bosses’ prosperity. There are not less than |8,000 workers in the fertilizer manu- in Norfolk, | of froma 25 to 40 cents an hour. | Practically all the workers in this industry are Negroes, who have in jrecent years migrated to the tri- cities. | 14 Hour Day in Lumber Plants | Then the lumber industry;is quite |impor| tant in the tri-cities, for there jare more than 5,000 workers em- ployed in it. Many of them are Ne- roes. Their wages range from 17 Ifo 85 cents an hour. They slave |from nine to fourteen hours a day. Clothing Plant Moves South. In Norfolk there is a clothing |firm by the name of Sam Finkel- stein’s, which came here from New York City because of labor trouble, and which now employs’ 700 work- lers, mostly young girls, both Negro and white. Their wages in this plant average from $9 to $17 a week. The girls work nine hours and more a day. These are some of the conditions in the state of Virginia which show |that the workers down here are ripe for real militant unions, led by the | Communist Party, In my next let- ter I will tell of more of the fac- tories and shops in this state, progressive pha: gle, the purely repre: of ‘the State powe: bolder and Take Your Vacation ~at--- Wingdale, N. Y. City Office: 1800 SEVENTH AVE. —BY TRAIN— From 125th St. or Grand Central Station direct to Wingdale, N. Y. Tel: Wingdale 51 Tel. Monument 0111 | Newly built bungalows , make possible accommoda- | tion for 150 additional | campers, A New Pump Just In- stalled. Grand Celebration at Opening of New Library | This Week. | Bathing, Boating, Fishing, Dancing, Singing and Dramatics —BY BUS— Today and Tomorrow at 2 p. m. from 1800 7th Ave., cor. 110 St. |