Big fight brewing in rail

Scan page 4

An historic confrontation is brewing between rail labor and management. The carriers see the contract negotiations scheduled for 1988 as an opportunity to take back gains that were won by workers through decades of struggle.

In order to help prepare union members for the upcoming contract year, rail workers in the Upper Midwest are planning a solidarity conference.

The Rail Union Solidarity Conference will attempt to mobilize unionists against the latest threat from rail management—the "shortline."

Through the union-busting shortline scam, the rail carriers are assembling a transcontinental network of non-union lines to be used in the event of a national rail strike. The rail carriers are also petitioning Congress to forbid secondary picketing by rail unions.

Rail labor needs a strategy to defeat this union-busting drive.

The conference is open to all rail-union members and their spouses. It will be held in the Cotillion Ballroom at the Ritz Hotel, 315 Nicollet Mall, downtown Minneapolis, Minn., on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 11 and 12. For more information call (612) 789-3302. strike-breakers in Jay. (A similar bill enacted by the state legislature was vetoed earlier by Maine Governor John McKernan Jr.)

• Establishing tougher requirements on large-scale temporary housing in the town. (Fifty trailers on mill property are being used to shelter scabs.)

• Strengthening the town's environmental oversight role with a $75,000 appropriation to pay staff and consultants. (When I arrived in this picturesque little town of 5100, the first thing I noticed was the foul smell from the river. According to several strikers, the company dumps its waste materials into the water.)

I.P. has stated that it will challenge the new ordinances in court, charging that they "violate state and federal law and inject the town into a labor dispute."

A barbed-wire fence All in all, it looks like another long, protracted struggle against another corporate giant. But the strikers are in it to the finish. One union member with more than 20 years in the mill pointed to a gleaming 10-foot-high section of chainlink fence topped with heavy-gauge barbed wire.

"See that fence," he said, "it's almost seven-and-a-half miles long. They put it up right before the negotiations started. I.P. said they were just complying with a state law requiring the fence." He added, "I think it is only there to keep us out."

He then said he had heard of another mill, not far away, at which contract talks are scheduled to begin soon. "Guess what?" he asked, "They are putting up a fence too."

He chuckled and concluded, "I wonder if they really think that fence is going to keep us out if we decide to go in?"