"no strikes for the duration" (Vineland, 77)

"The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration."
(Vineland, 77)

"[...] it was the dark recrudescence of that hard-cased antiunion tradition
which had brought the movie business to California in the first place [..]
In one of American misoneism's most notable hours, a complex system of
accusation, judgment, and disposition, administered by figures like Roy
Brewer of IATSE and Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild controlled the
working lives of everyone in the industry who'd ever taken a step leftward
of registering to vote as a Democrat.


June 27, 2002
A CounterPunch Exclusive
Strikers as Terrorists?
Ridge Calls Longshoremen's Chief
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

" [...] a call from the man in charge of coordinating the battle against
terrorism on America's home turf confirms all the Left's deepest fears
that, as so often throughout the twentieth century, national security is
being used to justify strike-breaking, invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act
and declarations of national emergency to shut down labor activism and if
necessary throw labor organizers in jail.

Longshoremen don't need to be told this. They know it's what happened to
their most famous leader, Harry Bridges. In World War II the US government,
particularly through the US Navy, cut deals with the Mob (mainly involving
a hands-off posture on the drug trade), giving the Mobsters specific orders
on which labor leaders to rough up and murder. Between 1942 and 1946 there
were 26 unsolved murders of labor organizers and dockworkers, dumped in the
water by the Mob, working in collusion with Navy Intelligence. [...] There
are other sinister signs that "homeland security" is being used as a club
to bash labor. The right wing is working fiercely to make the prospective
new umbrella Homeland Security Agency non-union, again citing the
paramountcy of national security. Once again this takes us back to the
darkest days of domestic repression at the dawn of the Cold War.  "

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn0627.html



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mis·o·ne·ism   Pronunciation Key  (ms-nzm)
n.

Hatred or fear of change or innovation.
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[Italian misoneismo : Greek mso-, miso- + Greek neos, new; see newo- in
Indo-European Roots.]
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miso·neist n.
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.