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BLACK POWER IN STEEL                     POWERS
union grievance committeemen) establish departmental "home rule" procedures which are discriminatory; so is the system of so-called "labor pools" where there are five and ten pools in each mill instead of just one pool. In a number of steel mills where Black steel workers are on the move, and where these practices have been militantly challenged, the company eliminated them. 
the new challenges
Now that our country is caught in the grip of an economic depression, sharply intensified by the Nixonian wage freeze, Blacks and Chicanos face new threats to their hard won rights and security in the mills. A stark example of this is in Mayor Hatcher's city of Gary, Indiana, where the Federal government acknowledges a 35 per cent unemployment rate (primarily affecting Blacks). It has been said that these mass layoffs are due to "stock piling" and "foreign imports." While these play some role, the fundamental fact is that America and the steel industry especially are in a major economic depression which continues to deepen and spread worldwide. After years of grabbing up huge profits at the expense of workers' living conditions, poor peoples' starvation at home; robbing the Asian people, and destroying many of them, as well as our own youth in the "dirtiest war" our country has ever fought, the entire capitalist economic system is going through one of its historic crises. Not satisfied with looting and destroying the homeland of millions of Asians, our Government has permitted the big corporations to loot the Federal treasury of taxpayers' money to guarantee the super profits of the billionaire corporations, banks and Wall Street gamblers. Thus our "free enterprise" system is proven to be neither free nor enterprising for the American people. All talk of wage freeze and ending inflation are tricky works aimed at putting the entire burden of this corporation-made depression upon the shoulders of the working people and the nation's unemployed. There is a real danger that if labor and the people do not stand up and fight back, tens and thousands of steel workers now on lay-off will never be called back to work. "More production with fewer men" is what is meant by more "productivity" talk. A drive to mechanize and automate the steel mills has been underway for some time. The Basic Oxygen Furnace will completely replace the present old open-hearth methods of steel production, where as much steel can be produced in one house as the old methods pro-
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