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EDITORIAL

qualitatively advance the struggle for democratic rights.

The four and one-half million workers in various industries, whose contracts expire this year, will in many cases have to go on strike and will need community support in their fight against wage freezes and for new contracts. That community support will have to be mobilized so that the general population better understands the issues in these strikes, and some anti-labor attitudes can be overcome.

In the present crisis in our country, there is no greater need that the black community has than for the moral authority of the labor movement to be restored and boldly asserted. During the great upsurge of the 1930's when black trade unionists helped to organize millions of the unorganized workers in basic industry, put an end in many plants to sweat-shop conditions and made the first steps toward giving real dignity to the industrial worker, labor enjoyed a great amount of moral authority in the nation at large. This was because organized labor was a movement in action and was championing the most basic needs of the working population at that time. Consequently, all progressive sections of the U.S. population saw their self-interest in labor's program.

This defines the challenge today. A struggle must be unfolded for better housing for the millions who still need it, for quality education for every school child, for implementation by Congress of the Full Employment Act of 1946 thereby providing socially useful jobs for all. In these struggles, it is the moral authority and fighting capacity of the labor movement that must be restored and asserted; and a movement built capable of bringing into existence and sustaining a new mass political party of the Left.

The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, once it builds a grassroots, mass membership can be a catalyst for that important development.

Meanwhile, the Nixon-Agnew Administration has been throughly discredited by the Watergate revelations. No previous administration has ever caused the Office of the Presidency to be held in such low esteem, nationally and internationally, as is the case today. Nixon is trying desperately to ride through the storm by feverishly shifting his political hirelings around from pillar to post hoping to stem the tidal wave.

Watergate has allowed all to see the real meaning of the campaign slogan Four More Years. That's the time the Executive branch of the government needed to finish their plans for constructing a police-

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