Ford's clean-up drive
cleans out— workers

By TERSIL OBRIOT

DEARBORN — I see by the
capitalist press and our own
workers’ papers, that Henry
Ford II has announced he is
going to clean up the air around
the Ford Rouge plant and other
Ford shops, because of pollution
in the air.

As a Ford worker who spent

over 25 years in Ford’s produc-
tion foundry and lived to write
in our press about it, I want to
recall about another anti-pollu-
tion campaign that Henry II
conducted back in 1950 when
I was working in the production
foundry.

It. was around 1950 when we
in the foundry got the news that
the company was going on a
cleanup jag and that $6 million
dollars was to be spent of Ford
Foundation funds. That’s Ford’s
tax free piggy bank.

10,000 Booted Out

At the time there were 14,000
of us working in the produc-
tion foundry. Ford rebuilt the
.whole setup and when they got
through only 4,000 of us return-
ed to work. Some got jobs, if
they had 15 years seniority, in
other parts of Ford, but thou-
sands were cast out on the
streets. You know a foundry
worker who has been in the
foundry, where the lights burn
24 hours a day and still you

can’t see for the smoke and -

fumes, can’t pass any respira-
tory test by any company doc-
tor. So these thousands who got
laid off, God knows what hap-
ned to them...

When we got back to work,
everything had been automated.
Instead of producing 120 mould-
ing boxes an hour on a line,
the production was up to 300
and the boxes were larger. On
the cupolas where before we
went out 50 men worked on
three of them, one man did all
the work. In the old foundry
they charged the furnaces every
eight hours, new style was every
16.

Cleaned Out People
Yes, Ford cleaned up the
foundry, but what he did was
cleaned 10,000 of my fellow-
workers out of the foundry and
the production was ‘more than
before.

What about the inside. The ~

smoke, the dust, the blowing
sand, still went into our lungs
and the silicosis and other res-
piratory diseases still flourished
among us.

I lived in Dearborn most of
my life, hung around the South
End on Salina street, a stone’s
throw from the coke ovens and
the assembly lines, the motor
building, etc.

There was no change after
the 1950 supposed campaign of
Ford against pollution — it was
a cleanup of jobs and increased
production and bringing in of
automation’s first steps. :

On the outside, Miller Road,
Salina Street, Dix Avenue, Mich-
igan Avenue, the Downriver
Area, were still hung over by
heavy palls of smoke, fumes,
chemicals and flying sand from
top of the Ford building along-
side Miller Road.

_ Pea Soup Fog

I remember the workers in
the south end of Dearborn,
across from the coke ovens that
lay down London type of pea
soup fogs every night, after
people go to sleep, so as folks
won’t see it, mobilizing their

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 10, 1970—Page 4

wives and children and going to
the Dearborn City Hall to de-
mand Ford be told to stop poi-
soning the air.

The people told of how their
cars were pockmarked, wind-
shields, bodies, from the flying
sand off the Ford plant roofs;
how in the Salina School, where
their children went, they never
could open the windows in
spring and summer because the
fumes would clear out the class-
rooms, the children coughing
and choking.

The racist stooge of the Ford
Motor Company, Mayor Orville
Hubbard, just sat and listened
and did nothing to this day.
You can drive down past the
Rouge plant on Miller Road,
Dearborn, after 11 p.m. when
the workers are stoking up the
coke. ovens, turning the coke
over and it’s like watching the
atomic bomb exloding, the
great clouds of smoke pouring
over the roads onto the work-
ers’ homes in Dearborn — and
that’s right now. . .

No Greenery

The workers’ lungs are being
filled with the gases, fumes,
sand—and so are the lungs of
their children. For miles around
the Ford Rouge plant you won’t
see any trees, shrubs, flowers.
Not even the weeds grow—they
wither and die.

Monopolists like Henry Ford
II can fly away to St. Moritz for
skiing, to Cannes in France to
lie on the sunny beaches, or
roost, when he is in Dearborn,
miles away, high up in the
“Glass House” skyscraper com-
pany office building, out of sight
and out of mind of polluted
Dearborn.

Never does Henry II come in-
to the foundry. Neither do the
thousands of rubberneck tour-
ists who come from all over
the world. The smoke, smog,
sand that foundry workers toil
in, would send the visitors
away, coughing, sputtering and
vomiting, like it did my wife
when I first took her through.
They tell visitors if they have
a heart condition they can’t go
through these places.

The UAW convention this
year should pledge to the work-
ers to worry about cleaning up
the insides of the plants, pass-
ing laws to force the com-
panies to clean up inside ‘and
outside and let some of us live
a little.

MARSHAL S. TIMOSHENKO, the

Ukrainian farm boy, Russian Army
private in World War I who rose
to become one of the Soviet
Union’s top military commanders
and hero of the war against Hit-
ler Germany's invasion, died last
week at 75 years of age.

“MUGUOUUADUEDAUOOODO OOOO OOUDUUEDROLUOORELUGUCUSUOUCUCUENOOROREOOEOCOOOOE OIE UANCANGGAELENOUOOGAUNGAEOAEDUCSUAUAANANOEOnAueANoGAcouegaeguceneeeee

Communist Party says:

Tax the rich, not the poor

Excerpts from a brief on the Benson White Paper on Tax Reform,
submitted by ‘the Communist Party of Canada to the Standing
Committee on Finance, Trade and Economic Affairs.

For some time now taxation
policy, combined with inflation-
ary price rises, have directly and
negatively affected living stand-
ards, while leaving loopholes for
corporate wealth to evade their
social responsibilities,

This is why great interest was
displayed in the Carter Commis-
sion on tax proposals which, for
the first time in Canadian his-
tory, began to get at the prin-
ciple of taxation based on ability
to pay. There was some hope
that the White Paper would in-
corporate these basic proposals.
However, those who control the
wealth of the country, including
the mass media, seem to have
had enough power to have the
Carter proposals thrown over-
board . . . Moreover, even the
White Paper, with all of its in-
adequacies, is now the subject
of extensive attack as a so-called
“socialist document” by the
same corporate and financial in-
terests.

The purpose of this well or-
ganized and financed attack is
fairly clear. Under the guise of
protecting the “little man”, their
aim is to maintain the status quo
and prevent any change in tax
policy which would in part en-
sure a more equitable and just
tax system.

Behind this well organized
campaign an effort is being made
to push Canadian politics to the
Right. Many Canadians may re-
call the Leadership League of the
30’s which was sparked by the
Globe and Mail publisher of that
day, George McCullagh, whose
real purpose was to eliminate
the CNR and hand over the
transportation system to the
CPR. The present campaign has
similar overtones.

Th2 White Paper proposes a
basic personal tax exemption of
$1,400 for single and $2,800 for
married. On the surface it would
appear to be a step forward from
the $1,000 basic exemption. How-
ever, it is not such a step for-
ward at all. The personal exemp-
tion of $1,000 was introduced 20
years ago. Over these twenty
years inflationary price rises
have virtually cut the value of
this exemption in half. Just to
keep up with the inflationary
spiral would have required a per-
sonal exemption of at least
$1,700 for single and $3,400 for
married. The present proposal
therefore, will not even equal the
1949 basic exemption. Moreover,
if the inflationary spiral con-
tinues, as it probably will, the
personal exemption will have
less and less value with every

passing year.

The new employment expense
allowance of $150 is a pittance.
As already indicated, corpora-
tions receive all sorts of allow-
ances including allowances in
the form of depreciation for ob-
solence of machinery.

Ability to pay, which is at the
heart of democratic tax reform,
requires that the rate of taxation
should rise progressively with

rising income. The fact is that -

the percentage increase in taxes

from 1965 to 1969 has been four
times greater for incomes of

ay)

$5,000 as compared to those of
$40,000 a year.

The new schedule proposes to
increase the rate on the lowest
bracket of taxable income by
nearly 50 percent. As income in-
creases, the rate increase de-
clines. As it reaches $24,000
there is no tax increases at all.
Above that level, the -rate of.
taxation is actually reduced, so
that a person making $100,000
in taxable income will have a tax
cut of $5,470.

The White Paper proposes a
maximum marginal rate of 51.2
percent compared with the pre-
sent maximum of 82.4 percent
on a taxable income of $400,000
per annum and over. This is a
policy which would increase the
tax burden on the lowest income
brackets by 50 percent, while re-
ducing it by over 30 percent on
the highest incomes.

Mr. Benson claims the prin-
ciple of ability to pay is achieved
through the capital gains tax.
But this principle cannot be
achieved without increasing
taxes on the rich to relieve the
lower and middle income groups.
That was the Carter objective by
advancing the principle “a buck
is a buck”, which Mr. Benson
has rejected,

The White Paper proposes to
remove 750,000 persons from the
tax rolls all together. This ,is
only one-half of the number
which the Carter Report pro-
posed to remove. It further pro-
poses to reduce taxes by a mi-
niscule’ amount for another
3,100,000 persons.

In the present inflationary si-
tuation this proposal is grossly
misleading. The real poverty-
stricken people who do _ not
make enough to pay income tax
have nothing to gain from Ben-
son’s tax reform. Those who
may gain some relief in terms of
personal income taxes, will pay
more in other ways through in-
flated prices and higher taxes on
goods of consumption.

How does the White Paper
approach the question of poverty
which presumably is involved in
the above proposal It is estim-
ated that four million Canadians
live at or below the poverty
level. It is also known that 50
percent of those in that category
are employed with earnings be-
low the poverty line.

Should poverty incomes be
taxable? Apparently the White
Paper believes it should unless
it considers that only the 750,000
Canadians excluded from -the
tax rolls live in conditions of
poverty.

We appreciate the fact that
tax policy alone will not resolve
the problem of poverty. Other
measures have to be taken as
well, such as raising the mini-
mum wage, increased family al-
lowances, education. housing
and so on. But tax policy never-
theless creates the sources of
income which can be applied by
the Government to get at the
problem. of poverty as well as
at the problem of regional dis-
parity.

Here again the question of
ability to pay comes to the fore.

of income.

.payments should not be taxa

‘top bracket in a progress!

UUUUUURLERRERRURERERE EERE RROD

A capital gains tax on one hand,
and a curtailment of the defens¢
budget on the other, could mak€ |
capital available for action |
against poverty. In our opinion |
all those earning at or below the”
poverty level should be excluded aq
from paying increased taxes an@ |
the additional revenues requi 4
could be met out of capital gains”

and tax reform, based on ability
to pay. f

’ We support the proposal for 4 —
capital gains tax as a lonh
overdue measure. However, it
main purpose is being disto
when it is proposed that the sal
of the family home and family”
farm be included in capital gai”
The White Paper’s proposal fof
a $1,000 yearly deduction is t®
tally inadequate. Our proposal is
that the family home and family
farm be exempted from the caph |
tal gains tax, and that other pr
visions be instituted to ded!
with those who speculate in res
dential homes and farm land.

We are of the opinion that thé
White Paper on “Tax Reform
should be recast on the principl® |
of ability to pay. A:

v The basic personal exemP
tion should be $3,000 for single
persons and $6,000 for marti¢
couples. Another alternative |
this would be to institute a SY*
tem of tax credits as proposed in
the Carter Report. This would
begin to get at those in the ib
erty and below the poverty lev?

~ Unemployment insurane

¥ Residential homes should
be exempt from capital gains ©
to a value of $50,000 and family
farms up to a value of $150,0¥™

~ Any meaningful shift of the
tax burden, based on the Pil”
ciple of ability to pay, must aA
ceed from the fact that. caP!
gain arises, in the first instan¢ :
from the exploitation of 1a
and natural resources, resulting
in the constant creation of M°”
and renewed wealth in the P
cess of productive activity fi
well as the necessity of taxi :
the fortunes made in the stor
exchange, land speculation a
in the selling and buying
sets for profits. Any caP! st
gains tax to be meaningful be
include both a tax on reali2”
capital gains and a tax On
realized gains. Moreover, such
tax must be at full income 4 |
rates commensurate with vel.

applied income tax rate.

v A proper and thorough-8Ont
reform of our present class
criminatory tax system must ve
properly related to an effect!
social security system an& ic
eradication of poverty, for wh a
there is no valid excuse ™ is
country as wealthy as Ours: © 19
is far too important a matte i.
be treated on a piecemea al’
as the government 1s now
tempting to do.

oe

ey day

~ Other forms of taxa

such as sales taxes and prone af
taxation, plus the distriDUOE en

taxation pewwers Js pede
local, provincial and fee ae

levels of government, have

z : v
taken into account in ay |
tows

discriminatory and
tax system,