LABOR FOCUS

Murray strives

to split ClO

RESIDENT Philip Murray is prepared to split the}
CIO wide open over the issue of support for the;
North Atlantic pact and the Marshall plan. This became.
clear during the recent CIO executive board meeting!
when: Murray ordered the left-wing minority either. to;

By MARY DOBBS.

By TIM BUCK

THE NATION

1945

ed,

hon Promises,

through,

' however,

hat about the Liberals

A TYPICAL example of how cheaply Liberal
provid nd Tory politicians hold election promises is
ided by the present new stage of acuteness of the
using crisis and the unscrupulous manner in which the
pe aeciiins who are directly responsible for the crisis are
‘wefan to make political capital out of it. :

With the lifting of controls the housing crisis has got
: than ever. ‘Thousands of families are being evict-
fore pelle. with little children. and babies are being
and a: live by the roadside with their furniture piled
friincal them. Not all of them can even get tents. The
the sas reason for this worsening of the situation is that
tended eral government removed those controls which

7 ¢ to freeze the situation with regard to occupancy
aving carried out its promise to provide more
Seas hus the present situation completes a cycle from
. ton promise through veiled repudiation to new elec-

Wors

rae 1945 the Liberals promised officially that, if
be ed to office, they would initiate a 10-year housing
pm me. The White Paper on National Income and

Ployment published shortly before the last election
Progr a big point of its promise of a large housing
be te as part of what was then presented to the

ble as a plan the government was pledged to carry

eee the election campaign the King government
iatel 2 public pledge that if re-elected it would immed-
build oustruct 50,000 homes for veterans and would
hs 100, UO homes per year each year during the 10
‘@ > following the election.

“Neither of those promises were kept and no attempt -

as mad

t © to introduce even a more limited scheme. It js
Tue that :

the Liberals had a very useful excuse in that

By J. B. SALSBERG

promise on health, housing?

George Drew and Maurice Duplessis stymied Macken-
zie King’s plan for Dominion-Provincial agreements. - It
would be wrong to minimize the importance of their
opposition because if the provincial governments of On-
tario and, Quebec had entered into agreements Mac-
kenzie. King would have had no excuse whatever for
not living up to all the promises he had made—including
his promise of a national health and hospitalization
scheme.

The point is that no attempt was made to live up
to Mackenzie King’s, promises even on a basis adjusted to
the fact that Ontario and Quebec were refusing to
cooperate. : : :

Instead of honoring the election promises Louis St.
Laurent, literally reversed the government’s attitude by
making a public statement that no government of which
he is part would ever subsidize housing. That, indeed,
did express the attitude and policy of the government.
If his public statement did make any change it was but
to make it official.

Now, with the crisis worsening and thousands of
families being rendered desperate, Liberal candidates
are looking up the election speeches by cabinet members
in 1945 and repeating their promises. Louis St. Laurent,
who repudiated the idea of the state subsidizing homes
only a short time back is now hinting at homes, social
security measures, health, and even state expenditures to
maintain “the home market.” Not to be outdone, that
Baron Munchausen of Canadian politics, Colonel Drew,
is trying to out-promise the man who studied under
Mackenzie King.

Neither of them will keep, or intend keeping, such
promises. Al] the things they promise are possible but
they can be achieved’ only by a united working class
effort against the interests that Drew and St. Laurent
jointly represent.

\lertness needed to fight speedup

which threatens health, jobs

Tt ex strike of Ford workers at Detroit and the
; ae of spontaneous stoppages in scores of major
ace met Plants, focuses attention on the growing men-
Be. the health-destroying, nerve-wracking speedup
Which large-scale, modern industry is conducting.
Cases . Speedup is also with us in Canada, and in some
Sistang € tempo here is even higher. Unfortunately, re-
Profit ity this heartless method of extracting greater
ing Se the expense of the physical and mental well-
ed wo Workers is not yet being fought by the organ-
the ee and it is high time that the struggle against

Sp UP was launched. ares :
hey, re edup aS a means of increasing profits is nothing
'S as old as the modern industrial system. It has,

become a refined art, particularly in the U.S.
anada

Speer? the
beet metsh

ome ‘the most notorious on this continent, The B.
Yailrg 4 baltimore and Ohio) system was the plague of

and railroad shop workers on the continent
€ twenties. There were, of course, myriads
Mostest Systems” which industry employed to get “the

St for the littlest,”

Tight. the eternal shame of the class-collaborating,
Doteg | "€ bureaucracy of the trade unions, it must be
hat they turned their union apparatus into aux-
Machinery for the introduction of the various
4P systems in their respective industries. Invari-
Claim Ot: Course, these ignorant, or cynical, jobholders
Method that the application of “improved production
in ey, S Would mean more jobs and higher pay. ‘But
o “rY single case the opposite proved to be the result.

First World War special “schools” of

ean :

ginnin the twenties, scores of left-wing union men, be-

expen, With Tim Buck, were hounded, suspended and
Bowe trom tet unions because of the fight they led

introauet® Policies of collaborating with industry to

© speedu’ ;
Today, te P methods

© speeding-up of workers in Canada is gain-

ods came into being, the Bedeau system |

ing an alarming tempo. The ill effects of it are seen on
all sides. In this regard it is interesting to quote Donald
Gordon, deputy governor of the Bank of Canada and
head of Wartime Price Controls. On May 7 he said:

“As nearly as we can make out. our total output
of goods and services was about 75 percent greater
in physical volume in 1948 than it was ten years
before. This figure is subject to many qualifications,
but I am sure it gives the right order of magnitude.

» To achieve 75 percent more production with 40 per-
cent more workers is, I think, better than most of
us would have expected... .”

This means that within a period of ten years the
net increase of production per worker was 25 percent!
And this was only in 1948.

It is common knowledge that the real “scientific”
drive to step up production was launched in 1949. In the
Windsor Chrysler plant, spontaneous action against
speedup was taken a few weeks ago. Similar rank and
file action against an impossible speedup of production
took place in the Oshawa General Motors plant. In the
Hamilton-Steleo plant a vicious process of re-grading
workers is now being executed at the expense of older
men. In the Porcupine gold mine fields wholesale dis-
missals of old-time miners commenced a few weeks ago.
The same procedure is in operation in the lumber camps
and in practically all branches of industry.

Now is the time for the Canadian trade union move-
ment to put a halt to this most vicious system of ex-
ploitation.

Already there is shocking evidence of tendencies
among many trade union jobholders to go along with
the speeding-up methods, It is the rank and file, there-
fore, that must take the initiative and force through
a militant policy against it. It is a battle that starts at
the work bench, at thé conveyer belt’ and at the lathe.
It is a job for shop stewards, shop committees and local
union executives. This is the only way the new menace

of speedup will be defeated.

>

join the national CIO in its slavish adherence to U.S.
state department policy or get out.

The board meeting, which brought together in Wash- '

ington some 52 leaders of all the CIO affiliates, empha-
sized the extent to which the right-wing majority: in

- CIO has abandoned all pretensions of trade union leader-

ship and has become unquestioning servants of the Tru-
man administration.

At a time when five million workers are out of
jobs. and signs ef an economic crisis are accumulat-
ing at an alarming rate, the leaders of 64 million
American workers devoted only a few hours cut of
a 3-day conference to e*onomic issues, and passed
merely token resolutions on wages and unemploy-
ment. The rest of the time was dedicated to a red-
baiting assault on the left-wing unions. The attack
was led by Murray who, ironically enough, rose te

leadership with the support of the left.

The unions un-
der left leadership,
which hold about
one-fourth of - the
cIo membership,
came to thé board
meeting with par-
ticularly bitter
proof of the degen-
eracy of current
CIO policy. Maur.
ice Travis, @ na-
tional leader of the
left-wing Interna
tional Union of
Mine, Mill and
Smelter Workers,
had just been at-
tacked and blinded
in one eye by a gang
‘which included rep.
resentatives of Mur-

be ce

Steelworkers’ goons did this to

Mine-Mill’s Maurice Travis, who "@YS own union,
last week had his right éye re- the United Stee]-
workers, and na:

moved. Murray dismissed the
attack as a “minor incident,” de-
nied Travis got more than a
“black eye.”

tional C10, The at-
tack was the climax
of a raid by the
Steelworkers on a
Mine-Mill local at Bessemer, Alabama. The. Mine-Mill
union charged that the raid was accompanied by open
terror, collusion with the company and use of the Ku
Klux Klan to frighten Negro workers,

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the steel
union’s shameful role in’ this affair, the CIO ex-
ecutive board passed a resolution taking away the
Mine-Mill union’s jurisdiction over the Bessemer
workers, and condemned the left-wing union for
daring to protest what had happened.

‘Similarly, Murray directed a stream of complaints
against President Harry Bridges of the International
Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union for pointing
out that the CIO had virtually betrayed labor’s campaign
to repeal the Taft-Hartley law and restore the Wagner
act. Another left-wing union, the United Farm Equip-
ment and Metal Workers,’ which has been successfully
fending off raids by the United Auto Workers, was or-
dered to surrender its membership to the auto union
by the October CIO convention or face expulsion.

Making its reactionary circuit complete, the board
formally approved CIO Secretary-Treasurer James B,
Carey’s single-handed removal of the CIO from the
World Federation of Trade Unions, and warned that any
CIO affiliate would be vidlating CIO policy if it main-
tained any ties with the WFTU. It also approved the
North Atlantic pact, to which Murray had previously
committed the CFO, and issued a direct appeal] to the
members of left-wing unions to oust their leaders.

Murray was obviously hoping to provoke the
left wing into walking out of the CIO, since he cannot
expel these unions without a two-thirds vote of a
CIO convention. The position of the left-wing unions.
however, is that they will remain in the CIO as long
as possible, and at the same time fight aggressively
for their democratic right to maintain independent
political positions. ; ;

Just how far the CIO has travelled from its demo-
cratic inceptions was shown in the joyful reaction to
the proceedings by AFL leaders, who were meeting at
the same time in another city. Born in revolt against
the AFL class collaborationists, the CIO is now thor.
oughly acceptable to the AFI, Its president, William,
Green, declared there were no longer any political ob-
stacles to reunification with the CIO, and as the first
step he announced that the AFL would join with the
CIO in forming a new anti-communist “world” labor
body to fight the WFTU. :

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MAY 27, 1949 — PAGE 9

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