Oe WILFRED BURCHETT REPORTS Now you can travel from Hanoi to Peking by rail PANO! capital of the Viet Nam Democratic Repub- lic, is now linked via Peking by rail with ce For the first time one can now travel from Hanoi to Paris, all the way by train ex- cept for the ferry crossing. the Yangtse river at Hankow. And Chinese engineers are al- ready at work spanning the mile-wide Yangtse with a great bridge. I have just travelled from Peking to Hanoi by train — an historical journey because the train from the Chinese- Viet Nam border was the first to travel over the newly laid tracks. Building such ‘a railway through the mountains of North Viet Nam in four months was no light feat. There has been a line from Hanoi to the Chinese border before, but this was almost completely destroyed during the war. Twenty - three high - level bridges including two major structures of about 300 feet length each were demolish- ed. Rails were torn up by guerillas and turned into wea- pons in jungle arsenals. Ballast was used to surface roads to battle fields. Road beds were hacked away and converted into rice fields. It was overgrown with jungle when work started to rebuild the new line at the end of Oc- er carrying baskets, with axes and human backs and shoulders for transport, with black powder for blasting chunks of rock from _ blue- stone outcrops and hammers to break the big chunks into pieces small enough for bal- last. * On the train to Hanoi I had the good fortune to find Ng- uyen Thi Luong, ‘a 32-year-old peasant woman whom I had met at the stone quarries when I visited the construc- tion site four months earlier. There is nothing to . dis- tinguish Nguyen Thi Luong from hundreds of thousands of other peasant women in Viet Nam. She has the black lacquer- ed teeth popular among the village women. She wears the same loose- fitting chocolate colored cot- ton trousers and white blouse as other peasant women. Her — face is brown and kindly, her hands strong and sensitive. The fact that millions of Viet Nam’s peasants are just like Nguyen Thi Luong is part of the reason the rail- way was built in record time and in the victories of the Viet Nam people over the im- perialists. But it was only with the greatest difficulty that I ex- tracted from his simple, mod- est heroine of the battle field and construction field details of her past activities. How had she come to be on the train? She smiled shyly. “My comrades elected me to come.” shells and bullets to our ‘soldiers and carry back the wounded from the front lines.” Her companion interrupted to tell me that she had been given a high military decora- tion for her feats at Dien Bien Phu. She started her political life by organizing the women in her village to shelter mem- bers of the resistance move- ment. Later when things got too difficult for them she carried on their work herself and when the French came to ar- rest her she fled and joined them. She returned again to her village and lived in a hole in the ground by day and most of the night, emerging only very late at night te carry on propaganda work with one family at a time until she had reformed a group to enable the guerillas to come into the village. For two years after that she fought with the guerillas, rifle in hand. She became an ex- pert in creeping up to French posts, removing the very mines laid to keep guerillas away and re-planting them- elsewhere to blow up French tanks and trucks. When the battle of Dien Bien Phu started she demand- ed to be sent to the front and was attached to the most for- ward position. Then she returned to her village, taking up her usual work of tilling her small patch of rice-field and acting as eantonal secretary of the women’s organisation until the appeal came for volun- teers to work on the railway. The train was packed with Top leaders of the AFL and Clo are shown here as they met at Miami, Florida, to approve the terms of the merger Seated are George Meany, AFL president (left), and Walter Reuther, CIO president. Standing (left to right) are: David McDonald, CIO Steelworkers president; Harry Bates, AFL Bricklayers president; William F. Schnitzler, AFL secrefary- treasurer; and James Carey, CIO secretary-treasurer. Meany will head the merged organization, with Schnitzler as secretary- treasurer. By GEORGE MORRIS What U.S. top brass fear in labor merger MY ae organization of U.S. labor co 15 million members of the AFL and CIO will be launched in New York Only the name of the organization is still mbining the City next December. in dispute. The CIO leaders, stressing the “new organization” principle, want a new name. The AFL leaders, who will have the two top officers and 17 of the 27 members of the executive coun- cil, want the American Federa- tion of Labor to continue as the name of the new organization. The provisions of the constitu- tion generally spell out the terms of the original AFL-CIO merger But it is evident the architects of the merger have become more fearful of a pro- gressive militancy in the united documents. affecting the application of either’ is in the hands of the & ecutive council, in which the group will have a two-third majority. There is no provision in the constitution for enforcing the stated principle against raiding and the preservation of the “ape tegrity” of any affiliate that may not choose to merge with or SY mit to another union. : One of ‘the more positivt points in the constitution—Pom 7 of the list of 12 objectives — says: “To give constructive aid # promoting the cause of pe4 and freedom in the world 4 b to aid, assist and cooperate wit free and democratic labor ™®. ments throughout the. ste tober, 1954. ‘such people as this modest, organization. The meaning of this in P Why had they elected her? ‘heroic peasant woman. The constitution. puts far tical application is some * “Tt was because I was nomin- The combat heroes of yes- stronger emphasis on exclusion else. ated as a model worker.” terday are the heroes of labor of Communists from office in the Lose SPN Se Simultaneously with approval of the constitution, the AFL oe ecutive Council rejected ream ster President Dave Beck’s 7 to admit the International is shoremen’s Association as 4 partment of his union. Beck indicated he will try 10 When the appeal went out for volunteers to rebuild the railway, it was answered in a few days by 80,000 peasant men and women, many of whom had spent the war years destroying roads and railways to deny es to the today. To them, to the thousands of Vietnamese whose villages lay within earshot of the new line and to the thousands more who jammed the station at Hanoi, the hooting of the locomotive sounded like vic- new organization or any of its af- filiates, and includes a lengthy section barring any unions ex- pelled or suspended by the CIO or AFL, or that may have seced- ed from either. This is clearly aimed at the ‘merger talks in progress or in Why had she come to work on the railroad? “Because after I returned from Dien Bien Phu and peace had come, I knew this was the most important task.” What did you do at Dien French forces. Bien Phu? “I used to crawl tory salvoes after a great prospect affecting CIO or AFL induce the small union the Pabeante GOs tie recions along the trenches and carry _ battle. _unions and the unaffiliated pro- chartered in the field to join hat Shichih winks fis Zine rons “ gressive-led unions, as well as Teamsters and through wt BRAM actus etouod © in the Teamsters’ move to admit the group’s merger with the now eee cat Weis to dnoaith e . pelled Ps cetiee hase gain ee objective. pia pre ee Ag : shoremen’s sociation. may ever, will depend on | bits of equipment hidden even be directed at the United M created away during the war years. dent George Meany, ae snd a be Mine Workers, which seceded the AFL rival to the ILA Others demolished the red both from the AFL and CIO. it under his thumb. ve brick forts built by the While the constitution is quite The council continues 10 yee ; French, sometimes right definite on dealing with the “red its suspension club over 2 astride the old railway track, menace,” it is evasive on the Amalgamated Butcher sae and carried away in straw question of guaranteeing full for admitting the Interna baskets the broken bricks to membership regardless of race, Fur and Leather Workers Uni niot fill in the gaps torn out of the creed, color or national origin into its ranks. diate the road, bed. as originally demanded by the Meany, appearing “concill he CIO. ory” to the leaders of ,.. sat «Almost half of the 80,000 went into the jungle to cut and transport wooden cross ties to replace the steel ones that had been turned into mines and hoes during the war. As in the merger agreement, Amalgamated, says he was she. only “full benefits of trade union isfied that progress was ma ists : organization” is promised. in eliminating some Commud} mn i The executive council is given or alleged Communists fro : authority to investigate any leadership of the Fur and Le unions it “has reason to believe” er division. He said the summit may be “Communist-infiltrated,’ meeting of the couric? vit and to recommend even suspen- take another look” into he sion, despite a provision in the — uation. pow preamble that is supposed to By the summer meeting, » the safeguard the autonomy of af- ever, Meany may have of filiates. strength of an organizatio? eal nearly a half million t ” <¢ with. The CIO Packingh Workers and the Butcher : ewal When I visited the site early in November, it was a hive of activity, and despite the difficult life of the work- ers, the scarcity of food, and the hard labor, it was a gay ; oa activity. lates oe ‘ be eee = % % it Both industrial and craft un- ionism are declared “appropri- ate, equal and necessary,” but men have scheduled a Jf ultimate decision on a dispute of their merger negotiations: PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MAY 20, 1955 — pack * For the people of Hanoi completion of the rail link with Peking was another victory. The construction was done primarily with hoes and wick-