STRIKE PROTESTS
OHIP RIP-OFF

SCARBOROUGH — About 650
workers, mostly women struck the
Honeywell Ltd., plant here March
20, rejecting the company’s 6%
wage offer and its refusal to pick up
the full cost of the 37.5% increase
in Ontario Health Insurance Plan
premiums flowing from the last
Ontario budget.

The last time the company
forced its employees, members of
the United Auto Workers into
strike action was the bitter 16 week
battle in 1970.

PICKETS UP
AT IRON ORE CO.

SEPT ISLES — United Steel-
workers at the Iron Ore Co. of
Canada ([OCC), installation here
went on strike March 10 to press
the company to move a little fas-
ter in current contract talks.

About 3,000 people at the facil-
ity are employed -by IOCC and the
Steelworkers haven’t had a con-

: tract since Feb. 28.

UMW STRIKERS
SEE OFFER

WASHINGTON — United
Mine Workers members in the
106th day of their strike March 20,
against the Bituminous Coal
Operators Association represent-
ing the U.S. coal monopolies, re-
ceived copies of the latest proposed
contract settlement to be voted on
the week of March 27-31.

The 160,000 miners have al-
ready turned down one inadequate
tentative settlement, and militantly
ignored strike-busting Taft-
Hartley back-to-work legislation to
back demands for an agreement
giving miners the right to strike to
enforce company contract viola-
tions, particularly in the crucial
health and safety field.

L.C.U.C. TO FIGHT
SUSPENSIONS

TORONTO — The Letter Car-
riers Union of Canada (LCUC),
said March 20 they will fight the
suspensions of two union mem-
bers by Canada Post management
because they delivered family al-
lowance cheques four days early
last month.

When management earlier had
made noises that it was consider-
ing firing the workers, LCUC
warned it would halt postal de-
liveries in protest.

PAPER WORKERS
TABLE DEMANDS

TORONTO — In negotiations
with Canadian International
Paper Co., and Abitibi Paper Co.,
the Canadian Paperworkers
Union (CPU) has tabled wage in-
crease demands calling for up to
17% over two years, it was an-
nounced last week.

PUBLIC SECTOR

WORKERS MEET
OTTAWA — Leaders of public

-sector unions across Canada, at the

invitation of the Canadian Labor
Congress, met here March 21 to
discuss a strategy to counter what
executive vice-president Shirley
Carr called ‘‘a declaration of war
on (public service) workers and the
unions which represent them.’’
The meeting involved organiza-
tions both inside and outside the
CLC and discussed certain obnox-
ious changes in the Public Service
Staff Relations Act, which among
other things would enshrine fed-

eral and provincial government -

plans to leave public sector work-
ers under wage controls under the
guise of tying wage and benefits
increases to those in the private
sector.

JOURNAL BOYCOTT
STILL ON
OTTAWA — The boycott

against the reactionary, union- —

busting Ottawa Journal is still on
printing unions here say as 84
printers, members of the Interna-
tional Typographical Union re-
main locked out in a dispute over
their right to benefit from the
newspaper’s introduction of
technological changes.

UFAWU SEVEN
TRIAL DATE SET

VANCOUVER — May 1 is the
scheduled trial date for the seven
United Fishermen and Allied
Workers Union members charged
with obstructing an investigation
under the Combines Investigation
Act. The seven include union pres-
ident Jack Nichol and secretary
George Hewison along with other
UFAWU members and officers.

The defense campaign, is ex-
pected to draw considerable atten-
tion at the forthcoming Quebec
CLC convention next month, as
the UFAWU 7 face maximum
penalties if convicted of $5,000
fines and/or two years in prison.

TORONTO — Angry Steelworkers’ local union presidents, took time
out from their lulnch break March 20, while attending their monthly

Toronto Area Council Meeting to march up to Queen’s Park protesting
the 37.5% boost in Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan premiums in the
recent Tory provincial budget. Demonstrators said the measure would
hit hardest at the poor and the unemployed, and noted that organized
workers would have to fight hard to resist paying for the increase at the

bargaining table.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 31, 1978—Page 4

EDITORIAL
COMMENT

Students fight cutbacks

Many thousands of post-secondary
students, along with faculty members,
have demonstrated their refusal to ac-
cept education cutbacks — the result of
provincial governments withholding
funds. If allowed, this would mean either
fewer facilities and lower standards, or
higher tuition fees — or both.

Higher prices for education, like
higher prices for almost anything, hit the
working-class hardest, and makes cut-
backs and inflation the concern of work-
ing people first of all. Millionaires and
other parasites will send their offspring
to university, or live in choice housing
regardless of cost. ’

The fightback of the students, the
workers and the farmers are, all of them,
a battle against the dictates and policies
of governments run by big business. It’s a

battle to counter the economic and pollit-»

ical instability running wild in the
capitalist system.
With reactionary governments sys-

tematically driving politics to the right,

jobs, education, parity for farmers, med-
ical services and other social necessities
are getting short shrift.

The more these rightward-moving

~ How far Israeli ‘rights’?

A propaganda flood following the Is-
raeli military invasion and atrocities in
Lebanon would have us pity the gangster
government of Begin and abuse its vic-
tims.

Amid the big business media crying
out its approval of Israel’s final solution
for the Palestinians, the Toronto Star
declares, “the Israelis were justified,”
they merely wanted “to clear the Palesti-
nians out of the border regions.”

Clearing a people out of existence is
more the Israeli goal. Other monied
media “backed” into support of
genocide. But the Star said flatly, “Israel
had a right to strike back,” as if trouble in
the Middle East began when 11 men
committed a terrorist act, however re-
gretable on the soil of the Israeli oppres-
sor.

Did the Zionist terrorists, one of them
now Israel’s prime minister, have the
“right” as far back as 1948 to attack Pales-
tinian settlements like Deir Yassin, and
butcher the occupants?

Did Israel have the “right” to drive
hundreds of thousands from their land
even by the end of the 1948 war?

Did Israel have the “right” through |

the 1950s and 1960s to bomb Arab vil-
lages, killing and maiming, to massacre
children in attacks on Syria and Lebanon
in 1972, to gun down a Libyan airliner,
killing more than 100 people? .

Did Israel have the “right” through all
these years to drive the Palestinians out
of their lands, dynamite and bulldoze
their homes, arrest the people, deport
many, subject them to torture and carry
out orgies of killing as they are doing in
Lebanon today?

governments are able to desert areas of

public responsibility and hand them over

to the mercies of the private sector, the
closer we come to scrapping anything;
and anyone, which is not profitable.

At the same time more and more con
cessions and outright gifts are handed to
the monopoly corporations. While
workers’ living standards are being cul
students are denied the right to acquire
the abilities Canada needs. .

The rekindling of militancy has been
seen in recent demonstrations by trade

unionists, farmers, and by the thousands _

of students who marched on the Ontario ~
and Alberta legislatures.

Once it is widely grasped by all thesé
sections of society that they are battli
the same corporation bosses, their gov?
ernments and their media, there will
exist the basis for a powerful ant

_ monopoly coalition to roll back the pre

sent crisis policies.

The unity — first of all parts of th
working class — and these other sectors
of society, opens the way toa force capa”
ble of changing government policy —
and where necessary, changing govern
ments.

Did Israel have a “right” to settle Is-
raelis on stolen land, to bomb Egyptia®
school children, to spread blood and

_ pain in four neighboring countries, 0

jail opponents, chain them, torture

them, break their health and refuse —

them medical aid? -

Only space limits the long list of such
“rights” the Israelis have exercised. Aré
these the “rights” the big business media
in Canada want to defend and extend for”
their client?

Condemnation of Israeli trampling of
human rights must be equalled by the
condemnation of the USA which armed
it for the very aggression it consistently
carries out.

This paper and the Communist Party
are opposed to terrorism as a politica’
method. We are not terrorists, nor are
many others, but if, like people
throughout Europe in World War I,
they are crushed by a ruthless military
machine. directed by a ruthless racist
ideology, they surely strike back against
their tormentors. ws a

The solution in the Middle East is tO”
put a stop to the Israeli government pol
icy of terrorism and genocide, and t0_
return to the Geneva peace talks with the
Palestine Liberation Organization as thé
legitimate representative of the PalesU-
nian Arabs. -

If Israel cannot be brou
sanity, it is not.by sending a

—

ht back to_
N force t0_

protect it from retaliation while it carries

out its annihilation of Lebanese an@
Palestinians, but by stringent sanctions:
that the rights of other countries, and th
world’s right to peace, will be protected.

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