A recent issue of Newsweek, (January 28) a magazine published from United States, reveals how the capitalists will use every legal and illegal method to break any efforts of the workers to form a union.
United States, the so-called land of equality and freedom will not allow the workers to protest and fight against their exploitation. The workers of Cali-fornia, a southern state of US, have to face many attacks in their attenipts to form a union. In the past, militant workers faced physical violence. When that failed to stop workers from uniting against the capitalists, the exploiters began to use new methods.
For instance, a militant worker will be given a job which will keep him apart from other workers.
A foreman, who is a management chamcha will be given fewer workers to supervise, so that he will be able to convince them against joining any union activities.
In Anja Engineering Corporation, a plant in Manrovia, California, the management hired 26 detec-tives to break an attempt to form a union. One detective testified before a legislative committee that their job was to write down the name of any worker who talked of wanting a union. “If their names appea-red in more than one agent’s report, we would find ways to get them fired or arrested by Manrovia police.”
In the town of Salisbury in North California, a company attacked the workers’ efforts to form a union by sending its employees a tape-recording of a strike which was full of sounds of gunshots, screams and breaking glass. In the tape, the union ‘suppor-ters’, who were actually professional actors, spoke with a Negro accent. As the company employees were mainly white, the recording frightened them and they refused to join a union that was supported by Negroes.
US trade union workers say that besides the usual type of lawyers who help managements in their fight against unions, there is now in America a number of lawyers who specialise in providing ‘legal help to capitalists who want to prevent unions from coming up. These ‘advisers spare no effort to fulfil the wishes of their employers. The advice of a Chicago lawyer is that it is absolutely legal to scare female employees with ‘threats of strikes, violence and picket lines.
The capitalists and their lawyers know that as long as it is a question of increasing their profits, anything is ‘absolutely legal in this land of so-called democracy.