T - International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers

NOVEMBER, 1942
fore, the following definitions of, and limitations upon,
the jurisdiction and authority of the courts of the
United States are hereby enacted."
If the Saturday Evening Post and that, group of
right-winged business men believe that they are going
to bring back that day when the yellow dog contract
and all its accoutrements prevailed, they are badly
mistaken. At first thought one wonders at the temerity
of this group of men that raise their cry for fascism
in the midst of a war for democracy, hut they have
always acted with this fearless regard for their own
interests.
Cooperating Newspapers have a habit of playing up
100 Per Cent only alleged failures of labor to cooperate
in defense and war programs.
They do not play up i disinterested acts on the part of
labor unions to forward the programs. Downl at Leonardtown,
Md., the Cummins Construction Co. and
Riggs, Distler Co. are building a new United States
Naval Air Base. They employ a great many workers
of the American Federation of Labor. This communil
is generally a farm community, and farmers have been
unable to got the aid they needed to get in their erups.
The workers at the Naval Air Base offered their services
free on any Sunday to farmers who may need
them to harvest.
Why We Are We are fighting a war so that we
Fighting a War can maintain a way of life through
the future which we have found
through past experience to be not perfect, but pleasant,
decent and dignified.
That way of life to the average man is made up of
many small things, which, grouped together, comprise
such high-sounding titles as democracy and
freedom.
These little things consist of taking off your shoes
and hoistintg yoer feet up on the porch railing after
the day's work is done, of having a few beers with the
boys on Saturday night, of pulling down the blinds
and locking the door and answering the doorbell only
if you feel like it, of respecting your neighbors' privacy,
of going to the movies or to church whenever
you take a notion.
It is just such things that we are shcdding blood
and sweat and tears to mailtain.
Silver For conturies silver and gold have been
grouped together as precious metals. Silver
and gold have, moreover, boeel used for ages as symbols
of wealth, power and magnificence. Ileaven's
streets are supposed to be paved with silver and gold.
Emperors and monarchs wore silver and gold as evidence
of their regal position.
Perhaps nothing, therefore, i*ndicats I he extent of
the paroxysm of change which is shaking this planet
more than the lowered position of these precious metals.
Gold production in the United States has been halted
by goverenent order, and silver-second in order of
precedence-is being used to take the place of copper
as all electric conductor. Recently a new war plant
has received 1,000,000 pounds of silver for interior
wirng andl switching. Now electrical workers may become
silversmiths. At any rate, there will be novel
work conditions on the job where silver, not Copper,
rules. E ngineer$s paint ortl that silver is as good, or is a
better conductor, than copper. Necessity now dictates
its use. Not scarcity but utility determines its value to
an embattled nation.
Good-bye Social If anyone quietly took American
Security? vworkers aside and told them that
the important social security program
in the country is endangered, they would not
believe it, so assured has lahor been that this necessary
adjustment to a fluctuating economic system has
come to stay. Strictly speaking, no one is attacking
the social security program from the front, but it is
being done to death by slow torture from assassins
who come in by the back door.
Take the recent vote in the United States Senate
flixing, for the war's duration, the contributory tax at
I per een, when the law scheduled this tax to go to 2
per cent, This action of the Senate did not attract
much Iiblic attention, for it was accomplished with a
grandiose gesture in the direction of patriotism in
order to economize. But the action struck at the fundainental
principle of the social security pro,/a m,
namely, to build up reserves in time of prosperity in
order to pay bpnIofils in lime of adversity.
Take the inauguration of experience rating in the
majority of states. This program also is dressed up to
look like a just measure to encourage management to
adopt sound methods of management to keep workers
at work instead or laying them off. But management
is not responsible today for employment. War effort
is responsible for employment. The concept of experience
rating is a narrow one, basing social security
upon the plant or the industry, instead of upon the nation
as a whole. Employers are now being exempt from
tax payments in the majority of states for something
the; don't do. As a result, social insurance reserves
which sho(tid be mountbig are dwindling.
Take the action or the state employment insurance
executives organizing themselves into a lobby to fight
alnd oppose the federal government. These executives
are wilfully cripplbig the war effort, for their opposition
extends to United States Employment Service.
They move under the guise of defending democracy.
They also whoop it up for state's rights.
The fallac. of course, lies in the fact that democracy
is not a territory but a process. It is no guarantee
of democracy to have states rather than the federal
government control job insurance. Indeed, it might
work out in reverse, as it often has in the past. It is inefficient
to have 51 instead of one job insurance programn,
and the workers lose thereby.
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