Changes- Pro and Con This is my fifth year as a sub- scriber, and I would like to take this opportunity to comment on some of the changes which I have noted over the years. I am delighted that you have been able to adopt a magazine for- mat, as my old newspaper-style copies are certainly becoming old and yellowed, and yet I want to keep them as excellent reference tools on various topics. The style of the magazine has matured too, with a little less rhetoric and a little more substance. The documenta- tion remains at high standards, giving credibility to your reports, as well as help to the would-be researcher for additional sources of information. I am disappointed, however, with the gradual de-emphasis on Latin American news. While the in- depth reporting on the problems of labor and class conflict throughout the hemisphere is relevant, NACLA does not serve, as in the past, as the vehicle for reporting of current developments. Thank you for the excellent research you have brought to my door over the years and my best wishes for the continued ex- cellence of your publication. Crystal Graham Ithaca, N.Y. Steel Talk I've just finished reading your "Steelyard Blues" issue. My first thought was "incredible." I had heard, through local newspapers, about the "import steel problem" 45update * update. update * update but basically knew very little about the industry otherwise. Your his- torical perspective along with your question-asking series of con- nected articles is quite powerful. Of course there are points in your argument I'm not sure about, but I think that your presentation is ob- jective in presenting facts so that I can draw some conclusions my- self. (I would have liked more ex- planation of the steelmaking pro- cess.) You speak to the question of U.S. wages and foreign wages (p.38), and these questions come to mind. How do you measure levels of exploitation? How do you compare relative benefit of wages? Are foreign steel workers twelve times more exploited than U.S. steelworkers? It is also difficult for me to see "any advance for the workers" under your suggested program of Trade Adjustment Assistance pay- ments, financed by specialized business taxes, because it seems much like taxpayers absorbing the losses indirectly. And isn't taxing foreign profits of multinational cor- porations somewhat similar to tariffs when it's a U.S. subsidiary import? Michael H. Owens Austin, Tx. The "Steelyard Blues: New Structures in Steel" Report docu- ments what the current crisis of capitalism means for the steel in- dustry, and how the industry, the banks, the government and the trade union bureaucracy are all responding to old problems with a somewhat new face. In other words, the Report supports and elaborates what the steelworkers basically already know from their 46 living experience. After all, it is they who have borne and continue to bear the brunt of the latest maneuvers of capital and the sell- outs of the union bureaucrats, who live with the resultant speed-ups, the deteriorating equipment and safety conditions, the ineffective or nonexistent means of enforcing work rules and the general eroding of their hard won rights. In essence, they know they are the ones who produce the profits for the outrageous executive salary increases and the costly but profit- able diversification and restructur- ing of the industry that you docu- ment. The Report upbraids George Meany for his protectionist talk by accusing him of wanting to turn the clocks back, yet you have no qualms about handing out "ad- vice" to steelworkers to demand such things as greater unemploy- ment benefits, job retraining and secured pensions to be paid by taxing multinationals and special business taxes; as if the steel- workers, and the labor movement in general, were devoid of a history rich in demanding the very things you suggest and more; as if that history has not revealed the absur- dity of appealing to our govern- ment, employers or bureaucrats for help or relying on their benev- olence for satisfying those de- mands; as if that very history has not revealed that workers are con- sistently more innovative, more persistent and more astutely radical in a struggle than their leadership. It seems that you, as well as Mr. Meany, have confused today with yesterday, or at the very least you've neglected labor's yesterdays. The shifts in the international division of labor and the flight of capital that you document are symptomatic of the international crisis of capitalism. As your Report states, the problems of the U.S. steelworkers are merely one mani- festation of these international maneuvers, the solutions of which must therefore also be of an inter- national nature. Yet you reduce this international nature of working class interests to a common strug- gle for parity wages, and the prob- lem in general (by virtue of your conclusions) to one of struggling for immediate demands, i.e. solvable within the framework of trade unionism. It is not your solutions per se that are being objected to, for in the proper context they each have validity. Rather, it is the counsel- ling of steelworkers in a Report that documents those who create, prolong, intensify and benefit by the problems and conditions of the steelworkers, and leaves a con- spicuous void with not more than incidental mention of the struggles and conditions of the Brazilian, Japanese, European or even the U.S. steelworkers. You counsel a strategy of solidarity while, by vir- tue of the void, you treat the inter- national working class and the U.S. rank and file as passive fac- tors in your international division of labor and flight of capital schemes. You counsel aggressive tactics to put workers on the road to controlling their own lives and society but ignore their aggressive history and are silent on their essential decisive role in the pro- duction process. Within the con- text of your Report, your sug- gested solutions lack the basis needed to clarify rather than fur- ther obscure the problem you set out to document. New York, NY
