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RIBUNE PHOTO — MIKE PHILLIPS

Victory may well be in sight for the Radio Shack strikers after their bitter two
U.S.-owned electronics firm for a first agreement and union recognition.

year fight with the union-busting

SLF head greets Women’s Day

Heirs to a century of work.

REGINA — “On behalf of all
organized ‘women in Saskat-
chewan, we send special greet-
ings to all Saskatchewan women,
on this, the 70th Anniversary of
International Women’s Day,
March 8", said Nadine Hunt,
president of the Saskatchewan
Federation of Labor, and chair-

rson of the SFL’s Women’s
Committee. **We are dedicated in
our efforts to achieve women's
full equality, for the recognition of
women as equals in all spheres of
endeavor, be it economic, social
or political”, she continued.

March 8 is that special day set
aside when hundreds of millions
of women throughout the world

celebrate their victories and re-

flect upon the great tasks that lie
ahead. The history of Inter-
national Women’s Day goes back
to 1908, when women who
worked in the garment industry in
New York refused to work and
held a demonstration for laws

ainst child labor, for the right to
vote, for better working condi-
tions and higher wages, for better
housing and health care and for an
end to the “‘sweatshops’’. Two
years later an International Con-
ference in Denmark passed a re-
solution to commemorate the
event, making it an international
day of celebration for women.
Since 1910, March 8 has been a
symbol of inspiration for women
of the world:

‘*We are the heirs of a century
of work and sacrifice’, Hunt con-
tinued. “The participation of
women in unions goes back to

“Women are still being streamed into low paying jobs where they are the

1886 when Elizabeth Wright of
the Knights of Labor became the
first woman delegate to the
Trades and Labor Congress in
Toronto. This achievement and
those of other trade union women
since then lives on in the hearts
and minds of those who continue
today...

“We are now midway through
the United Nations Decade for
Women’’, said Hunt, ‘‘and we
need to pause and reflect where
we have come from and where we
are going. Statistics indicate that
we are making little progress, if
any. The wage gap between men
and women is increasing, women
are. still being streamed into low-
paying jobs where they are the
last hired and the first fired.

“Unemployment Insurance
Act amendments recently singled
out women who cannot find long
term stable employment as spe-
cial victims of clitbacks in eligibil-
ity for benefits,” she noted.
**Part-time work and lack of child
care facilities continue to plague
the women of today. Add the
problems of sexual harassment,
stereotyping, property rights in
marriage, and the list is still not
complete. More and ‘more,
women are becoming aware of the
inequities, but in the final analysis
we must condemn those in indus-
try and government who are
responsible for them.

» **We call upon all women to
make the 1980s a decade of
intensified effort to achieve equal
pay for work of equal value; equal

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last hired and the first fired”, stated SLF president Nadine Hunt.

Job opportunities; for an end to
unemployment and poverty,’ she
declared. “‘In order to achieve our
goals, we must be strong and un-

ited, and the trade union move- _

ment must be that main source of
Strength for all women’’, she con-
cluded.

Guest Column :

By WILLIAM STEWART.

» Ontario Premier William
Davis said it all for big business!

Working people, he intoned,
cannot expect ‘‘that incomes
must rise by at least the rise in the
consumer price index’’.

To restate the matter, workers’
real wages “and living standards
must go down as living costs go
up. ;

At least Premier Davis must be
thanked for putting it so frankly.

A wealthy Rosedale (Toronto)
matron was heard, at about the
Same time, babbling at the mouth
about the impertinent Bell-work-
ers striking for higher pay.

In almost the same breath she

- Went on to tell about a $250,000

renovation job she was having
done on her home.

Chances are if you got into one
of those exclusive Metro social
events (perhaps as a waiter) you
would find our Rosedale lady and
Mr. Davis rubbing elbows, two
peas in a pod.

Karl Marx exposed both of
them, more than a century ago.
Laying bare the basic difference
between capitalism and social-
ism, Marx noted that under
Capitalism, workers must serve
Capital — (and serve it and serve
it), whereas under socialism capi-
tal must serve labor. Both quite
simple and quite profound.

What smiling Bill Davis and our
Rosedale lady are telling us is
working people must serve capi-
tal today through lower wages
and living standards.

While Mr. Davis calls for lower
wages for workers he hands out
our taxes in amounts ranging from
fifteen million to a hundred mil-
lion dollars to pulp and paper, and
auto firms, whose profits are al-
ready at an all-time high.

Labor Board upheld

TORONTO — The Supreme
Court of Canada has upheld an
Ontario Labor Relations Board
ruling against Radio Shack, and
refused the latter's appeal. It
backed the Board ruling that the
company had flaunted Ontario
labor law and must compensate
the United Steelworkers and its
members employed there.

The Supreme Court rejected
Radio Shack’s appeal March 10 in
the latest development of the
Steelworkers’ two-year fight to
organize some 200 warehouse
workers in the company’s Barrie,
Ontario location.

The Labor Board orders, up-
held in February of this year by
Ontario Divisional Court compels
Radio Shack to make a complete
contract offer to the union and
drop its insistence that payment

of union dues be voluntary. The’

company, a subsidiary of the
giant U.S. multi-national Tandy
Electronics Corp., was also or-
dered by the board to send a letter
to all Radio Shack workers admit-
ting its violations of the Ontario
Labor legislation and promising
to obey the laws in the future.

Further, Radio Shack has been
ordered to let Steelworkers’ or-
ganizers hold a meeting of com-
pany employees in the plant dur-

Our Rosedale lady blows a cool
quarter million on her house:
enought to pay 250 workers a
wage increase of 54 cents an hour
for a full year; while fuming about
grossly underpaid Bell workers
demanding and striking for a pay
increase.

What the Bell workers and
other strikers and workers across
the country, in and facing negotia-
tions, are demanding is that capi-
tal serve the working people, all
working people. .

That’s what the wage move-
ment is all about and there is
every indication that given
leadership the organized trade
unionists in Canada are prepared
to go to the wall to defend and
extend their wages and working
conditions, as well as their social
benefits.

However, as is always the case
when the pie becomes smaller
(through no fault of workers) the
struggle around how it is shared
becomes fiercer. There is evi-
dence, unfortunately, that a sub-
stantial body of the leadership of
the trade union movement is less
than willing, and perhaps even
unable to live up to the new re-
sponsibilities placed on them by
these new conditions.

._ This confronts the movement
as a whole, and particularly the
left in it with the challenge of de-
veloping the movement from
below into an irresistable force
which can push such unwilling
leaders before it and win substan-
tial pay increases, better working
conditions and block the’ cutback
schemes of the monopolies.

The great Sudbury miners’
strike was both proof that it can
be done, and a model of how to do
it. The Bell strike today is current
proof.

Capital must serve
working people

ing working hours to explain the
labor board’s decisions. All
employees including those who .
crossed the picket line were or-
dered to be paid by the company
for monies lost resulting from the
loss of opportunity to negotiate a
contract.

The board also ordered Radio
Shack to compensate the Steel-
workers’ union for all negotiating
costs and extraordinary organiz-
ing costs incurred in the two-year
campaign. ‘ -

Last Dec. 5, the Labor Boarc
convicted Radio Shack of bad
faith bargaining and cited earlier
convictions against the company
for unfair labor practices.

These “included the firing of. |
and discrimination against union
supporters, hiring spies to inform
management of union organizing
activities, and negotiating with
the Steelworkers without any in-
tention of reaching a collective
agreement. __

The strike began Aug. 8 after a
long and bitter organizing drive
which was resisted by the com-
pany using every union-busting
trick in the book. The right to
negotiate a decent contract con-
taining union recognition is the
key issue in the fight which in-
volves mostly women.

Workers will keep their heads
above water and advance their
economic interests to the exact
degree they fight against the sys-
tem, finally up to and including
changing it. They will go down, to
the extent they accept any degree
of responsibility for that system’s
survival. :

Corporation profits in Canada
are at an all time high and growing
at almost unprecedented rates.
Wages have gone steadily down
for the past three years. Un-
employment is at close to 10%
and inflation hovers around 10%.

The proof is in for anyone who
needed it — inflation never was:
caused by workers’ wages.

Workers: pay goes into pur-
chasing the necessities of life,
hardly inflationary. A large part,
which become ever larger as it
goes up the pay scale, goes to
taxes which pay for the social
services everyone enjoys.

What this country needs now,
more than anything else, is ‘the
kind of shot in the arm it would
receive by a big increase in the
purchasing power of the working
people. this would help reduce
the tragic unemployment figures
and further contribute to every-
one’s standard of living.

Better pay and shorter hours
must become the byword of the
Canadian labor movement and
the Canadian Labor Congress. Its
provincial federations and labor
councils must become the rallying
centres for the kind of Canada-

‘wide movement needed to win

these two objectives.
No better place to start than the
coming CLC Convention.
William Stewart is Ontario

Leader of the Communist Party
of Canada.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 21, 1980—Page 5