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By ARCHIE JOHNSTONE

Oil shares are booming again.

Sanatorium at Yalta once Tsar's

favorite palace (Now it's mine)

YALTA te is five hours’ flying time from Moscow to the Crimea, but if you judge by the thermometer in- stead of the chronometer the fly- ing time is minus five months, from November back to July. What passes for winter here is more summery than England’s far-famed summer days — both of them.

Even the Voice of Discipline, nuw dabbing its nose with three varts vodka to one part vinegar (tighly recommended locally in the early stages of sunburn), vould excuse me from writing while on vacation; yet here I am writing you these few lines while sitting sun-bathing on our bal- ecny of the Livadia Palace. The Voice would explain the contra- diction not by my zeal for work but my love for phrases like “our balcony of the Livadia Palace.” Obviously the vinegar is winning.

Our balcony of the Livadia Palace looks out over the Bay of Yalta, whose beauty, I am glad to say, is indescribable. The bay, the port of Yalta, the Livadia Palace, our balcony, ourselves and some hundreds of miles of material for typical sub-tropical picture postcards, are all caught in the curve of the Crimean mountain range which in places like the Ei Petri escarpment just behind us rises perpendicularly fer 1,609 kilometres, or, let us say, a mile. The range, with its guarantee of protection from the north, east and west winds, is the main reason for this corner of the world being what it is, which is something.

Your intrepid correspondent and the Voice of Discipline scal- ed the awe-inspiring Ei Petri es- carpment the other day by a cir- cuitous route, with only our faith- ful taxi-driver as guide.

-But about forty years ago a bunch of the ‘local lads went straight up it, for technico-politi- eal reasons. They reached what must_be the finest natural adver- tising space in the world, a, smooth surface of rock about the size of a city block, and painted on it ,in letters five stories high, the words “Doloy Tsarya,” which meant much more in that time and place than it means to us now. s

‘Doloy Tsarya”’ is Russian for “To Hell with the Tsar,’ and the hell of it was that the Tsar was then vacationing at the Livadia Palace and, for all I know to the contrary, on this very balcony where I am. writing these few

lines and where the Voice of Dis- cipline is now resting from its labors of dabbing its nose with three parts vodka to one part of vinegar.

The Tsar, although he was able to mobilise hundreds of scrub- bing brushes and drums of turp- entine, could not find any volun- teers among his ever-loving sub-

jects to scale the heights of Ei”

Petri. So they called out the artillery, and for days and days they blasted . and blasted the ‘Doloy Tsarya.” Even after the actual words were obliterated the blasted rock went on proclaiming its blasted message.

It is, I think, permissible to re- call here (a) the case of another well-known king, Belshazzar, who had the same kind of thing hap- pen to him while he, too, was throwing a party, although, of course, the writing on the wall about his being weighed in the balances and found wanting was in much smaller type; (b) the moving finger which writes, and having writ moves on; nor all thy Piety nor wit shall lure it back ta cancel half a line; and (c) the fact that there is quite a bit of writing on the wall all over oc- cupied Europe these days.

ae et xX

Crimea is full — too full for my time and space — of historic and prehistoric remains and of legends and stories about ghosts and bogles and things that go bump in the night.

No wonder. Since the Early Stone Age it has been populated, depopulated and repopulated re- peatedly. There are cave dwel- lings and paleolithic remains all over the shop, especially at Sim- feropol, the capital. 7

“Simferopol” meaqus Busytown; _

its centuries-old civic emblem is a beehive and it seems to have been a busy little place for rather more than a hundred thousand years, which makes Romulus’s founding of Rome in 753 B.C. seem like yesterday.

To add to the legend material

- there have been invasions and

uccupations by Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Mongols and Tartars, not to speak of the British, French, Turks and (for some reason that beats me) Cardinians whose cas ualties in the Crimean War of ex- ectly 100 years ago upped the ghost population by quarter of a million. Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do or die —

witches’ arms and fingers.

‘bedchamber with

a sentiment whose purity is sur- passed only by the purity of the good Lord ‘Tennyson’s rhyme, “yolleyed and thundered . noble six hunderred.”

Then there were Denikin and that other unlucky British in- vestment, Wrangel, to add to the crimes of Crimea, not to speak of the Nazis who also left their traces, including, typically enough, the wreckage of 109 out of 169 sanatoria. That loss, of course has been much more than made good in recent years.

The spook capital of the pen- insula is a valley in the mountain range near here which is strewn with boulders like petrified ogres and with overhanging trees whose blasted branches and ex- posed roots stretch out like The valley has had different names in Greek, Tartar, Russian and so on, but they all mean—yes, you’ve guessed it — Ghost Valley.

But back to our balcony, which

should have its own quota of spirits more disembodied than its present Voice of Discipline.

-Livadia Palace was opened last

- year aS a sanatorium and vaca-

ton home for a thousand persons et a time. In 1945 it was the scene of the Yalta Conference (which suggests. the question: How high does F.D.R.’s name stand om the official black list compared, say, with Abe Lin- coln’s?). Before the Revolution it was the Tsar’s favorite palace. Now it’s mine.

Our neighbors, four girls site a Kiev factory, invited us in to see their quarters, the Tsarina’s its beautiful wood-panelling and its little priv- ate staircase which allowed Ras- putin to minister to the Tsarina’s spiritual needs without arousing too much uncharitable comment. With my peculiar flair for that sort of thing. I learn that “Ras- putin” means son of rasputnik, which in its turn means son of a so-and-so.

I asked the girls if:they ever heard the stair-treads creaking; buit it seems that, with the pres- ence of a thousand materialistic- minded vacationists, Livadia is no happy hunting ground for a disembodied monk.

It seems, indeed, that none of the old regime stands a ghost of a chance in the new regime.

By WILLIAM KASHTAN

What does GAW

T is now apparent that the

Guaranteed Annual Wage — GAW for short — and other im- portant demands will be the basis of negotiations between the Unit- ed Auto Workers and the Gen-. eral Motors chain in 1955.

UAW President Walter Reuth- er is reported as saying it may first be fought out in the GM chain in Canada. If this is so it looks as if a major battle is shap- ing up, the outcome of which may have an important bearing on the future of the labor movement.

Certainly sucha battle deserves and must receive the support. of

_ every section of organized labor.

GAW has received a lot of pub- licity. Both the TLC and CCL have expressed support for it. In- terest in it is bound to grow.

Generally speaking the positive attitude of workers to GAW mir- rors the deep ‘sense of insecurity which prevails in face of contin- ual layoffs.

Will GAW do everything its supporters claim? -

At various times the terms “guaranteed annual wage” and “guaranteed employment plan” have been used to express what is being advocated. Actually it is neither, for it guaranteer neith- er year-round employment or year-round payment of wages.

Is it a guaranteed wage? No, it isn’t. There is no suggestion, at least so far, that workers would get wages 52 weeks of the year whether they work or not.

What is suggested is that work- ers who are laid off receive com- pensation or supplementary un- employment insurance from the company for which they worked.

Tsatt a: guaranteed employment plan?

There is no suggestion that the proposal would guarantee year- round employment. While it might not be a factor in prevent- ing some aspects of layoffs, GAW could not prevent layoffs in gen- eral — or an economic crisis.

® It might have been better to

call the Proposal a form of guar- |

anteed annual income. For if it were won on the basis indicated by the union, the companies con- cerned would be committed to paying additional compensation over and above the unemploy- ment insurance benefits workers would ordinarily receive.

For example, when a worker is

mean to workers?

laid off, depending upon his or her seniority status and the num- ber of weeks worked, he would receive credits at the ratio of one for every two weeks work- ed. The company would pay so much per week over and above unemployment insurance benefits to every worker covered by the guarantee.

This is the guts of the proposal. Does this mean that workers

‘should be indifferent to GAW?:

Not at all.

Any measure or proposal which protects and advances labor’s real interests and: living standards should be actively supported and fought for. But it must do pre- cisely that and not victimize any group of workers in the process.

Autoworkers might do well to ask the following questions:

“Will GAW be spelled out so that it guarantees at least 75 per- cent of their ,earnings on the basis of the 40 hour work week during the entire period of the layoff?”

“Will it include all workers on seniority or only those who have two years seniority?”

These are the two minimum | provisions which must be clearly spelled out.

It should also be noted that GAW comes up against a snag 1n Canada.

As the unemployment Insur- ance Act now reads, no worker could receive this type of compen- sation from his employer and also © receive unemployment insurance.

Therefore two other things are required — either the present Act would have to be amended or, the employers would have to compensate the worker by that amount — highly unlikely.

If a properly worked out GAW is to be won, there must be a strong united pressure by or- ganized labor on government for such amendments, and avart from GAW, what is also needed are amendments -which would sharp- ly increase payments for the en- tire period of layoffs for every worker.

*

The other side of the problem of course, is basic — the need for labor to take up the fight for new national policies of full employ- ment. GAW deals. with layoffs as they occur. What is needed are policies which would prevent layoffs.

Soausy | = Sans