-

- Waterfront victory

HE bitter strike with its attend-

ant “jurisdictional” problems
which tied up Northland Naviga-
tion Company ships for 19 days has
ended in a signal victory for most
of the unions involved.

This victory centred, not so much
upon winning increased pay en-
velopes for the National Associa-
tion of Marine Engineers manning
NNC ships (although that is also
important), but upon the ability of
organized labor to unite its forces
in B.C. against union raiding by the
CLC-expelled Seafarers’. Union,
against Shipping Federation union
busting, hired imported goon squads
from the U.S., and a Socred Trade

_ Unions Act (Bill 43) aimed pri-

marily at making trade union unity
and solidarity impossible through
the media of court injunctions and
other legal gimmicks designed to
cripple working class unity.

New party

A national seminar to begin the
job of building a new political party
as projected in the Canadian Labor
Congress 1958 “Winnipeg Resolu-
tion” is scheduled to be held in Win-
nipeg, August 28-30.

This announcement was made
last week by CLC president Claude
Jodoin and CCF national president,
David Lewis. Attendance is to be
chiefly “by invitation” of a CCF-
CLC joint national committee.

To attain any appreciable mea-
sure of success, in keeping with the
perspective of a broad labor-farmer
political alliance, as set forth in the
CLC resolution, the Winnipeg semi-
nar will have to get off the narrow-
gauge track prepared for it by CLC-
CCF top brass, and away from the

idea that unions and farm organ-

izations will have no other function
than providing the finances and the
votes necessary for a CCF victory
at the polls.

Pacific Tribune
Phone MUtual 5-5288

Editor — TOM McEWEN
Managing Editor —- BERT WHYTE

Published weekly ot
Room 6 — 426 Main Street
! Vancouver 4, B.C.

Subscription Rates:
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Six Months: $2.25

Canadian and Commonwealth
countries (except Australia): $4.00 one
year. Australia, United States and all

_ other countries: $5.00 one year.

EDITORIAL PAGE

Despite these obstacles the Na-
tional Association of Marine Engi-
neers manning NNC ships, the In-
ternational Longshoremen’s and
Warehousemen’s Union, with the
powerful backing and active support
of the B.C. Federation of Labor and
its affiliated unions, battled through
to victory.

The SIU raiders have been re-
pulsed, the Marine Engineers are
sailing Northland ships, the long-
shoremen are back on their jobs,
temporarily seized by the SIU with
Northland approval, and the gun-
toting-baseball-bat “union” goon
squad imported from the U.S. to do
“a job” on B.C. trade unionists has
made a hasty exit. All objectives
were gained because of the magni-
ficent unity demonstrated by the
B.C. Federation of Labor and its af-
filiate unions.

The Northland Navigation strike
points up an old lesson which or-
ganized labor can re-learn in every
struggle, viz., that regardless of the
odds or the “unity” of government-
employer agencies and their numer-
ous anti-union “legal” and extra-
legal devices to weaken, disrupt and
misrepresent labor, the formula for

- victory is as old and invincible as

labor itself—maximum unity, soli-
darity, and confidence in the justice
of its cause.

She resumption of the Geneva
talks between the Big Four
foreign ministers last week was it-
self something of a victory for
peace, particularly since the nuclear
war-minded fringe who dominate
the foreign policies of our “free”
West, have literally moved heaven
and hell to stave off any agreement
which ran counter to their own
nuclear lunacy.

Right in the opening sessions of
the resumed talks, U.S. state secre-
tary Christian Herter “challenged”
the Soviet Union to pyt down “in
writing” that it has terminated its

' “threats” on West Berlin. This, said

Herter, echoing Eisenhower, is the
“price” of a Summit meeting.

In this, however, as on other vital
matters aimed at avoiding nuclear
devastation, and because of a stead-

_ily rising tide of world opinion

against the crime of atomic destruc-
tion, neither the British or French
ministers can afford to back the
Eisenhower-Herter “price.”

All the chatter about not “desert-
ing” two million people in the “free”
West’s “free” Berlin is just so much
reactionary eyewash. At no time,
prior to or during the Geneva talks
has the Soviet Union “threatened”
West Berlin.

They have simply said that eleven
years after the Second World War,

Comment

The Geneva talks

in order to ‘assure peace in Europe
and the world, a peace treaty Wit
Germany must be effected; that m
order to achieve this that all for
eign armies should get out of East
and West Germany, thus enabl

the governments and peoples
these two states to work out th |
provisions essential to peaceful co

existence and German unification.

As against Herter’s provocative
demands for Soviet “guarantees @
writing,’ Soviet Foreign Ministet
Andrei Gromyko has again put for |
ward the basic essentials of th
above objective; (1) the cessation
of subversive and hostile propa
ganda from West Berlin against the |
German Democratic Republic
other socialist states; (2) a ban of
the deployment of atomic all
rocket weapons in West Berlin, 4
(3) a reduction of Western arms and
forces in West Berlin to token num-
bers.

For the Adenauer govern
and its Western backers these
visions may seem difficult, bu'
to common people everywhere ea!
estly seeking peace. They point
only road to peace. x

Geneva will succeed—and the
Summit meeting which will follow
—because the choice is limited; @
broad highway to peaceful coexist
ence, or the dead-end street of ml
clear devastation!

Tom
| McEwen

UST recently I received a leaflet

_ through the mail entitled “Cru-
sade For Freedom,” with a special
message from President Eisenhower
on why Radio Free Europe, the propa-
ganda nerve center of these mottled
crusaders, must have the financial
support of all Americans “to con-
tinue its effective work.”

Radio Free Europe has 29 power-
ful broadcasting stations situated in
West Germany and Portugal, two
outstanding bastions of “freedom” in
our “free” West. These stations are
beamed to Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania,
East Germany. In the language of

.. these several nations, a steady round-
the-clock barrage of propaganda is
poured out daily by “respected es-
capees from behind the Iron Cur-
tain,” with a goodly helping of can-

. ned U.S. “culture” tossed in to sweet-

en the mess, and to demonstrate how
all of us‘ living in the ‘free” West are
just busting at the seams.with sheer
happiness. And of course, anxious
and willing to share our happiness
with the poor souls in these Socialist
countries—if they will only get busy
and: overthrow their respective Com-
munist regimes. We want them “to
know they have not been forgotten
by the free world.”

Probably to help soothe the grow-
ing grouch of the American tax-
payer this leaflet dedicates a para-
graph to the “difference” between
Radio Free Europe and the equally
notorious Voice Of America, which
boasts its global canned cold-war
propaganda in 39 languages. Ac-
cording to the authors this “differ-
ence” is narrow indeed. V-of-A is
an out-and-out U.S. state department
institution for the propagation of as-
sorted Yankee ballyhoo on the glories
of our “free” West, and of course,
the many “evils” of Communism.
Radio Free Europe rests upon “the
voluntary private support of millions
of Americans.” As far as the U.S:
taxpayer is concerned, the “differ-
ence” between the two is about as
wide as that between Tweedledee and

Tweedledum, between a Herter and

a Dulles. “But,” says President Ike,
“wide contributions by American
citizens and American enterprise are
essential” to keep these giganti¢ lie
factories in operation.

26 * *

Another example of our “free”
world came in a phone call to our
office last week from an aged pen-
sioner, a veteran in the British labor
and socialist movement long before
a lot of us were born,.and active in
this country for many years until the
infirmities of age threw him on- the
human scrap heap.

“Hello, is that the Pacific Tribune?
Well, my name is such-and-such and
I live at so-and-so. I’m nearly blind —
now so I can’t read our paper and
I can’t go out. I just sit here alone
week after week, existing on a small
pension and, well, you know how it
is .. . I would like to talk to some-
body about our movement. Couldn't
you send somebody up to have a
chat. Things have moved a long way
since I was a young man.”

“Our movement, our paper.” Not
even a billion-dollar Yankee subsi-
dized Radio Free Europe and Voice
of America blaring coldwar 24 hours
a day can quench that flame, with
its urge to have “somebody up for
a chat.” ;

July 24, 1959 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PA