[P.O. Box 20209 Ca. Fin. 693 Columbus Ave…]

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P.O. Box 20209 Ca. Fin. 693 Columbus Ave. New York, N.Y. 10025 Pittsburgh 1625 Pillow Ave.

Harwick, PA 15049 San Francisco 3435 Army St., Suite 308 San Francisco, CA 94110 (415) 821-0458 Santa Barbara P.O. Box 90644 Santa Barbara, CA 93190 (805) 962-4011 Seattle P.O. Box 11 Bothell, WA 98041 Dear editor, I came across this article in the April 9 issue of Spark, which you might wish to reprint. It gives a concrete example of why workers should oppose Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs:

"In mid-March the president of the Steelworkers union at Michigan's McClouth Steel, John Skidmore, was suspended and then fired by management. He was accused of leaking information that the company had lost money because of two serious accidents in the mill.

'In early April, management reinstated Skidmore, but without back pay, and with his being on probation for a year.

"MacClouth Steel, outside of Detroit, Mich., is supposedly owned by the workers. In 1988, after McClouth had gone through years of financial turmoil, the International leadership of the Steelworkers union and McClouth officials negotiated an ESOP (Employees Stock Ownership Plan) by which millions of dollars of workers' money was used to bail out the company.

"Officials of the company have referred to this ESOP as a "cooperative partnership structure, providing a mechanism for labor and management to work together."

"What kind of a partnership is it when it's the workers who have bailed out the company to the tune of buying up 87 percent of the common stock; when it is workers who have given up 10 percent of their gross wages, so that they make the same amount in wages today that they made 10 years ago; most likely to be responsible are in the highest layers of the bureaucracy.

We should be careful about complaints about the "quota system" for higher education in the Soviet Union. It is actually an attempt at affirmative action. Jews are at least as well educated and as concentrated in the intelligentsia and in the Communist Party as any other group.

But Jews do not form a nation. Especially in the large Russian cities, they are virtually indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors. The Yiddish language is a thing of the past. Religious beliefs and practice, while on the rise, are still at a low level.

By maintaining "Jewish" as a nationality, the bureaucracy has prevented the assimilation of the majority of Jews, setting the basis for the current wave of antiSemitism-and ultimately forcing many Jews to emigrate.

John Halabi, New York, N.Y.

A reply Jews and non-Jews alike in the Soviet Union have been organizing grassroots committees to combat anti-Semitism and to support the right of Jews to selfexpression in religion and culture. These goals provide an alternative to emigration and should be supported.—Michael Schreiber We welcome letters from our readers. Please keep them brief.