Daily World repeats slanders against P-9

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The Communist Party is up to its old tricks. In its newspaper, the Daily World (Feb. 6, 1986), writer Bill Dennison parrots United Food and Commercial Workers Union President William Wynn's slander campaign against the striking packinghouse workers of Local P-9 in Austin, Minn.

The Daily World reporter repeats Wynn's lie that "Local P-9 opted out of chain bargaining, arguing it could do better on its own." Local P-9 President Jim Guyette refuted this false charge in a mid-January reply to Wynn, as Lynn Henderson reported in the March 1986 issue of Socialist Action.

"As you well know, from conversations held as recently as October, Local P-9 never 'withdrew from the Hormel chain negotiations," Guyette stated. "We were simply never invited by the international union. As our contract expired at a different date from those at some other plants, Hormel never sent our local a notice of contract termination.

"p-9's executive board sought to discover what rights we had to support the locals whose contracts were expiring," Guyette goes on to say, "such as attempting to discover whether or not we have the right to strike prior to the expiration of our contract. We did not withdraw-rather, we were convinced by the international union to stand aside and let the other unions negotiate, and we were commended by the international and the locals for standing aside."

It would have been a simple matter of fair play, not to mention the elementary requirements of responsible reporting—par -ticularly of a paper that claims to be socialist-to check the truthfulness of statements so harmful to a union on strike.

Several other cheap shots being circulated by the UFCW International bureaucracy are repeated by Dennison. Most important is the Daily World's echo of Wynn's slander that Local P-9 has been against united action in coordination with the other locals in the Hormel chain and has, as Wynn said in his "fact book" on the strike, "waged an unceasing hate campaign" against the heads 1 Care About my HOMETOUN, T Wish Horm DiD! of the UFCW International. Dennison writes: "The local leadership's attacks on the leadership of the UFCW has played into the hands of the corporations's union-busting strategy and will be used to split and divide other locals and used as ing the better job to a more favored emammunition against the union in organizing drives."

Thus, in the context of a widely publicized and unprovoked attack on the striking Hormel workers by the UFCW bureaucracy, the Daily World portrays the Austin local as the culprit violating union solidarity, thereby diverting attention from the ruthless attack by Hormel against all of its workers.

Moreover, reporter Dennison covers up Wynn's sabotage of the Hormel workers' fight to defend their livelihood. Dennison portrays Wynn's campaign to reduce wages and working conditions as really part of a "long-term strategy to raise the industry average to $10 per hour."

Reflecting his upside-down portrayal of the victim as the criminal, the Daily World reporter disingenuously calls for "unity" between "Local P-9, the international union, the state and national AFL-CIO and Gov. Perpich." Dennison shamelessly includes the strikebreaking governor, who called out the National Guard to clear a path for scabs through the picket line, as if he was a part of labor's family because he represents the state's Democratic FarmerLabor Party.

The Daily World article is never once critical of Gov. Perpich for strikebreaking, or of the state AFL-CIO bureaucrats for treating Perpich as an honored guest at their political action conference. The article never criticizes the UFCW International or the national AFL-CIO officialdom for their treacherous campaign against Local P-9.

The Daily World is critical only of the Local P-9 leadership, which has earned Wynn's wrath because they are unwilling to accept concessions and have shown their readiness to wage a courageous and militant rank-and-file fight to win their demands.

The Communist Party, for its part, is in traditional form. They remain committed to the Stalinist Popular Front policy of tying labor to the coattails of phony "friends of labor," such as Gov. Perpich. And also true to form, the Communist Party can be counted on to come up with leftistsounding rationalizations for the betrayals of its bureaucratic brothers under the skin-William Wynn and the top AFL-CIO leadership.

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