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Subscribe now and send oclallss Acllon, 3435 Army Sl., Rm. 308, Sa. F.ranclaco, CA 94119..... divert work to nonunion owner-operators and brokers, to use "double-breasting" (setting up nonunion dummy companies), and to use "casuals" —supposedly temporary workers who are never granted union rights and seniority. According to Business Week, 20 percent of teamster truckers are working at "informally" negotiated rates 10 to 15 percent belon national levels.

TDU defeats Presser maneuvers A year ago, due in large part to the organizing efforts of TDU, union members blocked the attempt of the TMI and Presser to reopen the Master Freight Agreement and grant more concessions. They voted down a relief rider by a whopping 88 percent.

This year Presser wanted to avoid another embarrassing defeat when he tried to railroad through a secretly negotiated contract with the United Parcel Service (UPS). He was blocked again when TDU mobilized the UPS ranks against the proposal. The contract did eventually pass, but TDU reasserted the membership's right to discuss the contract. (See the article in the October 1984 Socialist Action.) These two challenges to Presser set the stage for the current round of contract talks.

The NMFA expires in April 1985, but the Teamsters and the TMI have already asked for early talks. The employers' association itself is fragmented and, has been taken over by the four largest companies-the "big four" —Roadway, SOCIALIȘI ACTION patch. The two recent victories of TDU have already put Presser and the companies on notice that they will encounter some resistance to their plans.

The national contracts for carhaulers, tankhaulers, and cannery workers also come due this year. The Master Cannery Contract is the third largest contract for the Teamsters, covering some 50,000 workers. Management has indicated that it will seek to extend the concessions imposed in 1982—a wage freeze and a two-tier scale. The previous concessions, which were supposed to guarantee jobs, didn't prevent the collapse of one major company, Cal-can, and the loss of 9000 jobs.

Some speakers at the convention addressed the need to intensify organizing efforts into non-trucking areas. While TDU is open to all teamsters, its strength lies in trucking and related industry—also traditionally the stronghold of the union. But the New York members, among others, pointed out that truckers constitute a smaller and smaller percentage of the IBT. In Chicago, for example, out of 100,000 teamsters, only 25,000 are truckers. Presser has indicated that the IBT will give up organizing truckers because "it's too difficult."

In order to democratize the Teamsters union, according to some speakers, it is in the interest of T'DU to reach out to teamsters in production, cannery, and Name Address City Telephone For the past year, Socialist Action has been on the spot covering and taking sides in the major labor battles and demonstrations against U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean.

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ACTION PTF over 7 million Chinese soldiers died.

Only then were the first measures taken against bourgeois property and a planned economy prepared. It was to be 1956 before Liu Shao-chi, whom Mao would later denounce as a "capitalist roader,' announced at the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that the "coalition government of four classes" had come to an end.

Perhaps the most pronounced illusion entertained by defenders of Mao over the years has centered on the attitude of the Mao leadership to revolution outside of China. Seen through the distorted lens of Maoist polemics with the Khrushchev leadership, Maoism has been associated in the minds of the broad left with revolutionary fervor abroad and assaults upon privilege at home.

The reality has been remarkably different. It was Chou En-lai who orchestrated the 1954 negotiations in Geneva during which the Vietnamese victory over the French at Dienbienphu was converted into a partition of Indochina. He was thus responsible for the abandonment of the already liberated south to the U.S. surrogate, Ngo Dinh Diem, and for setting the stage for the U.S. war in Indochina.

When Khrushchev sought to omit China from negotiations with the United States for broad spheres of influence, the Chinese party denounced the Soviet Union. Soviet reprisals were of such devastating economic consequence that it had the equivalent force of a civil war. Factories were abandoned

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RECEMBER 1984 a gift to a friend AcTioN