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In the dusty border town of Rio Bravo, just across the Rio Grande from Pharr, Texas, the Duro Bag factory chums out the chichi paper bags sold for a buck at suburban shopping malls throughout the United States. The sección-part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, a pillar of support for the country's ruling bureaucracy since the 1930s--has a contract with the company, a protection agreement in which government-affiliated union leaders are paid to guarantee labor peace. Solidarity has captured the imagination of labor's activist core. It is still very difficult for border workers and their allies to muster sufficient economic pressure in the United States to force major corporations to respect workers' rights, much less change U.S. and Mexican government policies, which deepen poverty and lend the companies political cover.

FEATURES ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1955, THE INDOMITABLE WALTER REUTHER, a towering figure in the labor movement and the head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), began his Labor Day message to Americans by commemorating all that unions had achieved, from higher wages to greater dignity on the job. He championed small businesses with equal vigor, helping to establish and, for six years, chairing the Senate's Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business. One reason the Chamber has been so effective at persuading Americans to think of small business as a conservative faction, allied with big corporations in pursuit of an elite agenda, is that small businesses have never been well organized. [Extracted from the article]

Much more valuable to labor than the wage-hour bill, was a little measure which slipped through the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent one day last week. While the watchdogs of the special interests slumbered at their posts, the Senate adopted an amendment to the Walsh-Healey Act providing that no person or concern shall be eligible to bid on a government contract in excess of $2,000 who has been found guilty of an unfair labor practice. It would apply to nearly all construction under the naval-rearmament program and to most of the contracts to be let under the relief-recovery bill.

The article presents suggestions for progressive executive orders and actions to be issued by U.S. President Barack Obama during his second term. Topics include President Obama's environmental policy views on issues such as climate change and greenhouse gas regulation under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); his foreign policy and national security views on issues such as nuclear weapons; and his economic policy views on issues such as the creation of a National Development Bank. Suggestions are also presented for executive action on issues including labor laws, criminal justice administration, immigration law, civil liberties, reproductive rights, and voting rights.

The article focuses on the debate concerning illegal immigration in the United States. Activist and author David Horowitz wishes to end all immigration from Mexico and protect the border with military force. In 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush's proposal for immigration reform, that would legalize workers currently residing in America and provide a guest worker program for Mexicans seeking employment in America, was defeated by those on the right.

Focuses on Wal-Mart stores' prices and customers and its connection to poverty in the United States. Claim that Wal-Mart markets itself to low-income people and especially to poor women; Reference to a study by Andrew Franklin which showed that Wal-Mart operates primarily in poor and working-class communities; Statement that half of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers are blue collar workers and their families, while 20 percent are unemployed or elderly; Suggestion that Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton figured out how to make money off of poverty; Claim that the wages paid to Wal-Mart employees perpetuates poverty; Statement that Wal-Mart routinely violates laws protecting workers' organizing rights; Report that Wal-Mart discriminates against women in pay and promotions; Identification between the retail clerks at Wal-Mart and its customers; Discussion of the lack of impact of boycotts against Wal-Mart; Discussion of the female customer's loyalty to Wal-Mart; Report that Wal-Mart has encouraged its employees to collect public assistance so that it can avoid paying higher wages and benefits.

This article discusses workers rights of migrant guest-workers in the United States. Julio Cesar Guerrero came north from Mexico in the spring of 2001 as a temporary contract worker. Recruited by Manpower of the Americas, he was sent to North Carolina, where he began working on the tobacco farm of Anthony Smith. After a few weeks, his fingers started to hurt, and then, one by one, his fingernails began falling off. Although Smith told him he couldn't see a doctor, he went anyway. The doctor said his problem was possibly caused by working without gloves in fields sprayed with pesticides. So Guerrero, who was employed through the H2-A federal guest worker program, called Legal Aid of North Carolina. But Smith warned him not to talk with legal workers. Guerrero returned to Mexico at the end of the season. The next year, when he tried to get another job, he found his name on a blacklist maintained by MOA and the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA). Legal Aid protested, and as a result, Guerrero was sent to the United States again. That year, he worked for grower Rodney Jackson, who kept the workers' drinking water on a moving truck in the fields, forcing them to run after it with their mouths under the spigot. When Guerrero filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Jackson gave a warning notice and asked him to sign it. When Guerrero refused, Jackson fired him. A foreman took him to the bus station, telling him to go back to Mexico. Again Legal Aid intervened and got him assigned to another grower. Soon a growers' association representative gave Guerrero another warning notice, which he again refused to sign. Andrew McGuffin, staff attorney for Legal Aid of North Carolina, cautions, "the problem isn't that we don't have worker protection laws. It's that with guest workers they're not enforced, and when workers try to use these laws, they're blacklisted."

Staying union free is a full-time commitment. This admonition comes from a handbook Wal-Mart distributes to managers, and gives an idea of the passion and vision behind Wal-Mart's unionbusting project. The $259 billion retail behemoth that has become a defining feature of the United States landscape has also profoundly altered labor politics, deploying ever more creative and ruthless tactics to suppress the right to organize, while driving down wages and benefits in the retail industry and beyond. To take one example, after striking for months, grocery workers in Southern California were forced to accept a vastly reduced health plan early in 2004, as supermarkets, anticipating competition from new Wal-Mart Supercenters throughout the state, refused to compromise with the union--probably the first time in history that a potential competitor who had not even entered the market yet was such a key player in a labor dispute. Wal-Mart is the nation's largest private employer, with over 1.2 million employees. The average wage is around $8 an hour--and the health plan so expensive and so stingy in its coverage that many workers go without, or depend on the government to pay their medical bills. During the hiring process, many workers say they have had to sign forms agreeing that they would not support any effort to unionize the store, a clear violation of federal law. In Brazil Wal-Mart has had to reach agreement with unions on some workers' rights issues, while in Japan all of the company's workers are unionized, and Wal-Mart abides by an agreement reached with the stores' previous owner. In her 2001 book "Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory," Miriam Ching Yoon Louie describes how garment workers have developed worker centers both to agitate for rights on the job and to develop political consciousness and become part of a larger social movement.

The author tells the stories of immigrant workers taking part in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR) of 2003, and explains what the organizers of the IWFR hope to achieve. The IWFR's ambitious five-point agenda reflects the demands of a diverse immigrant constituency: a new legalization process for undocumented workers, an accessible path to citizenship, a commitment to family reunification for immigrants waiting for relatives abroad, extension of labor protections to all workers and strengthening of civil rights and liberties to insure equal treatment of immigrants. For two weeks, buses from ten cities hit the road, bound for Washington, DC, then a rally in Flushing Meadows, Queens, on October 4, where the crowd surged to 100,000, according to organizers. It's easy to become preoccupied with isolated flash points, harder to grapple with the insidious structures of racism that mold so much of the daily experience of immigrants and African-Americans. The vast diversity of today's immigrants further complicates the picture. The IWRF is a complex call for a new civil rights charter that includes the foreign-born. Employers are often the frontline enemy in this racialized reality. In the 1960s, and throughout US history, employers have used racial and ethnic differences to divide workers and weaken their organizing. In recent years, the arsenal available to employers aiming to exploit divisions among workers has been expanding. Under the Patriot Act the riders -- regardless of their place of birth or immigration status -- could have been detained if the government had somehow deemed their mission subversive. At the core of the IWFR is an evolving and sometimes rocky relationship between organized labor and the broader immigrant rights community, which have strong common interests but also some different priorities.

This article explores the extent of movement in favor of living-wage laws in the U.S. It's an increasingly sophisticated movement that uses a tool chest of tactics, from lobbying to postcard campaigns to economic impact studies, to win its goals. Activists putting together new campaigns need not reinvent the wheel, Jen Kern, of the Living Wage Resource Center, established by ACORN, travels regularly to offer advice, gleaned from ACORN living-wage fights, to fledgling campaigns, while organizers from across the country traveled to Los Angeles in early June for discussions with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, considered by many to be one of the nation's state-of-the-art economic justice organizations. INSET: United and Conquer..

The article reports that U.S. President George W. Bush is forging ahead with Cabinet appointments, policy forums and talk of a first 100 days. Bush and his team have assembled a Cabinet faster than any administration since Richard Nixon's. Bush's appointments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Interior and Energy look ready to lead a furious offensive against environmental regulation and common sense. His appointments to Labor and Justice promise an assault on choice, civil rights and worker rights. His heralded national security team looks resolutely backward to a cold war that isn't, and seems oblivious to the world as it is.

This article focuses on the fight of the immigrant workers for their rights. In 1997 New York State passed the toughest wage-enforcement law in the country-after an eighteen-month campaign developed and passionately led by immigrant workers, almost none of whom could vote. The participants were members of the Workplace Project, a workers center on Long Island. Its strategy of citizenship education and organizing shines light on one road to real political participation by immigrants. The Workplace Project and its fellow centers are far from having all the answers to the difficult questions of how best to organize immigrant workers. But what the project learned through the work that culminated in the Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act should be of interest to the labor and immigrant-rights movements in any case.

The article focuses on the rebirth of socialism in municipalities in the U.S. in 2015. Topics include class inequality in the U.S., neoliberalism in U.S. politics, and social movements in the U.S. Information is provided on minimum wage increases, workers' rights, and campaigns to end the school-to-prison pipeline.

The article presents the author's views on child labor. The author liked his own way of getting after the assassins of the child labor amendment a great deal better than the modifications which crept in through a slight process of rewriting In the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel it is written of anyone who offends against a child that "it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." At times, men have gone to the legislature who were not above sharing in the profits of organized vice, but even such might recoil at the thought of trafficking in the toil of children.

The snobbishness of the white-collar groups in the U.S. is on the whole exaggerated. If clerks, newspapermen, accountants and professional men have been slow in organizing, it has not been altogether because of reluctance. It is rather an inability. Missionaries have been too insistent in pointing out to white-collar workers their deplorable backwardness. Almost they have made it seem that this aloofness was a matter of predestination. A very considerable proportion of white-collar workers are ready right now to join the parade of organization if only space in the ranks is assigned to them.

The C. I. 0. has just suffered one of the most serious defeats of its entire existence. In an election held by the National Labor Relations Board on September 20 it lost Hollywood labor by an overwhelming majority to the American Federation of Labor (A. F. of L). The importance of this election is out of proportion to the number of workers involved. The movie industry is the stronghold of unionism in Los Angeles, and the strategy of the C. I. 0. was to capture the labor movement of Southern California by attacking the A. F. of L. fortress.

This article presents information on the passing of the tax and relief bills by the U.S. Congress. The delay of almost two weeks in the conference report on the tax measure permitted a few bills to be enacted that would otherwise have been lost, but the results, on the whole, were disappointing Among the measures rushed through at the last moment were the Walsh-Healey bill restricting government contracts to sellers who conform to NRA labor standards, the Robinson-Patman anti-chain-store bill, and the vicious ship-subsidy bill, which goes even beyond the present law in its indefensible bounties to indigent shipowners. In retaining the principle of graduated taxation on undivided earnings, the tax bill itself turned out to be far more satisfactory than had generally been anticipated.

The tug of war between labor leaders John L. Lewis and William Green, which is also the struggle between industrial and craft unionism, has been joined on an important issue, the organization of steel. The fight was precipitated when the Committee for Industrial Organization offered the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers U.S. $500,000 for a campaign to organize the steel workers along industrial lines. Green, for the executive council of the American Federation of Labor now meeting in Washington, has made a counter offer which excludes the Congress of Industrial Organizations and its money, reserves the right of the council to manage the campaign, and provides that jurisdictional rights of all craft unions shall be respected.

The right to one's body and the right to autonomy are undoubtedly the most fundamental natural rights of persons. A subsidiary one stems from the tight to autonomy. It is characteristic of human action to be purposive and to have results and consequences; freedom therefore is normally conceived as involving not only the right to decide what to do but also the right to dispose of or cope with the consequences of one's action. One aspect of this is the right to the product of one's labor, which has played an important role in the theory of both capitalism and communism. If this line of thought is extended to the point of considering one's property an extension of his person, the scope of the concept of violence becomes greatly enlarged-perhaps in harmony with popular thought on the subject, at least on the part of propertied persons however, one should always bear in mind that even a proper tied person can reconcile himself much more readily to loss of possessions than he can to loss of life.

This article focuses on the anti-strike bill passed by the U.S. Congress last year. In June 26, 1943 any one of a hundred Congressmen might have been seen to sit back and rub his hands in solid satisfaction. Over the President's veto the anti-strike bill had been made the law of the land, after ten years of overindulgence at the hands of New Deal labor, these statesmen thought, had been put in its place. They had voted-or so they believed-to arrest a trend, to check the political advances of the unions. They had made a good many wage-earners suddenly understand that henceforth their security would depend not only on the success of a union's dickerings with an employer but equally on the attitude of Presidents, Representatives, and Senators.

The article focuses on the political conditions in the Nazi occupied Slavic countries which includes Poland, Yugoslavia and Poland. Nazi oppression here has been particularly cruel. Summary courts have power to sentence suspects without even the pretense of a trial. In Yugoslavia the shooting of 50 or more citizens for the death of one German soldier was at one time almost a daily occurrence. At least two million Polish Jews have been murdered, and an indeterminable number have died in concentration camps. Severe labor measures have been imposed on all the Slavic peoples by the Nazi conquerors. The work week is from sixty to seventy-two hours, and the wage rates are generally reckoned to be about half those of German workers doing similar jobs.

One of the vicious aspects of the recent controversy over the 40-hour week has been the fact that avowed opponents of the 40-hour week have not been concerned about the length of the working week at all. Their concern has been to reduce wages—and increase profits—by eliminating the time-and-a-half wages now paid to employees working more than 40 hours. On that issue "The Nation" has made itself reasonably clear, that is sees no, reason at present for changing the Labor Standards Act, and regards the moves which have been made in that direction as ill-concealed efforts to undermine confidence in the United States government.

The onslaught of Winston Churchill's, statesman of Great Britain, on the Labor Party during the steel-nationalization debate was as brilliant a piece of sustained invective as that master of invective has ever achieved. It drew excited cheers from his back-bench supporters. Churchill, in his latest speech, accused the Socialists of pretending opposition to Communists while acting as the handmaids and heralds of communism. Worse still, he coupled this charge with the suggestion that the Labor Party had no right to pursue Socialist policies because the country was dependent on the non-Socialist U.S.

The article presents news synopsis. The extraordinary spectacle presented to the American people during the past week of four States of the Union with their militia in whole or in part simultaneously in the field to suppress riots and prevent bloodshed, ought to win the attention of thoughtful citizens to some of the deeper causes of the phenomenon. Also, to a superficial observer, the events of the last few months in America might seem to indicate that the "labor problem" was farther from solution than ever.

The article discusses American labor politics. Forty five million unorganized workers in the United States can never better themselves through organization by such unions as the Textile Workers, Retail Clerks' and the white-collar unions as long as Taft-Hartley remains as law and is interpreted as it is being interpreted by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). These workers are simply not organizable; and the lawyers and union staffers in the plush Washington offices, whose job is to thread their way through the mazes of NLRB decisions and administrative rulings,

The Senator Harry F. Byrd, who owns something like 2 per cent of all the apple trees in the United States, has proposed for the Taft-Hartley Act, for employees. The National Labor Relations Board has just ruled that they are violating the Taft-Hartley Act. They have been on strike against the O'Sullivan Rubber Co., for over two years, and after having been disenfranchised in a decertification election, they are now advised that they cannot continue picketing the plant down the road, and that their international union, the Rubber Workers, which has been giving them $25 a week strike benefits so that they' do not go hungry or lose their homes or possessions, must cease and desist from its nation-wide boycott of O'Sullivan products.

This article focuses on various current international socio-political developments and issues. It first discusses issues and political problems regarding U.S. public policies in context of Cuban question. At the beginning of the Spanish war, the U.S. has a political and governmental problem concerning the island. This is supposed to be the root cause of Cuban suspicion of tortuousness regarding American dealings with this island. The article further discusses criticisms of U.S. political litterateurs concerning so-called corrupt practices, against principles of labor, of Terence V. Powderly, who had been for some years the head of the organization styled the Knights of Labor.

This article focuses on various developments in the political and social field of the U.S. and also on concerned political personalities. Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey's, visit to Connecticut has been a part of his political campaign for the coming Presidential elections. Another development is on the so-called "Progressive movement" in context of labor laws and legislation. Public service commissions have been instituted in State after State, either under the pressure of general public sentiment or through the energetic labors of able and high-minded leaders like Governor Charles E. Hughes, who have not at all worn the label of the professional Progressive.

The article offers information and opinions about right to work (RTW) legislation in U.S. states in 2012. Topics include the influence of RTW laws on the power of unions, the efforts of Democratic legislators in Indiana to end an RTW bill, and the support of RTW measures by Republican politicians. The article also discusses the effects of globalization on the RTW initiatives, the impact of RTW on job creation, and the support of the initiatives by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It is suggested that RTW legislation reduces workers' wages and collective bargaining rights.

The article focuses on the impact of immigrant workers on America's economy and their role in transforming American politics. A recent bill from the U.S. House of Representatives sparked nationwide controversy, highlighting the number and solidarity of American immigrants. Labor movements and the Catholic church are commended for embracing the cause of Latino immigrants, and the author speaks of the importance of progressives joining in the cause of immigrant worker rights.

Over the past ten years leading up to 2004, a host of scrappy grassroots campaigns across the country have successfully pushed through living-wage ordinances in 112 cities and counties. Yet the federal minimum wage remains stalled for the eighth year in a row at $5.15 an hour--a shocking $10,712 annually for fifty-two weeks of full-time work. Local living-wage laws may have moral power, but they are limited in actual scope. Early living-wage efforts pegged the wage rate around a modest $7.50 an hour and raised the pay of a relatively small number of workers--those employed by companies holding contracts with a city or that receive municipal subsidies. That next step is a push for minimum-wage laws that affect all (or most) low-wage workers in a given city. The movement has gone on the offensive in some states, where activists are pushing to raise the state minimum above the paltry federal level.

Presents letters to the editor related to American labor laws. Actions taken by politician Alexander Cockburn; Description of several labor unions; Implication of being neo-Stalinist.

According to the author, several leading apparel manufacturers which promote themselves as socially responsible, also farm out some of their sewing and cutting to sweatshops that break labor laws. In their drive for low-cost labor their behavior goes beyond irresponsibility and in some cases it means garment workers do not get paid. The Department of Labor raided a San Francisco, California garment shop that works on contract for an apparel manufacturer, Espirit and owed its workers $127,000 in back wages. Department of Labor and Industries has threatened to enforce the hot goods provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This allows the government to halt the shipment of goods out of state if a contractor violates child labor, minimum wage or overtime laws.

Nothing scares business more than the specter of government interference in its God-given right to make money. For pharmaceutical companies, precisely such a threat existed earlier this year when U.S. President Bill Clinton promised to crack down on the $75 billion industry--and even suggested he would consider price controls to hold down the cost of medicines. During a mid-February 1993 visit to a health clinic in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. President Bill Clinton attacked the industry for pursuing "profits at the expense of the children," noting that the cost of immunization had risen 1250 percent between 1981 and 1991.

On a bulletin board inside the union hall of Local 5668 in rural Ravenswood, West Virginia, there is an unofficial wanted poster that pictures a balding man in a suit. To 1,700 out-of-work Ravenswood Aluminum Corp. (RAC) employees the fellow in the photograph, Marc Rich, is the cause of their troubles. As befits a fugitive entrepreneur, the connection between Rich and the Ravenswood factory is veiled, if it truly exists. Rich benefits from an international order in which a financier can enjoy havens of secrecy and protection from the prying attentions of labor or law enforcement officials. But the billionaire has not been able to escape fully the pursuit of a few determined unionists. Last year, at the Steel workers' request, a unit of the AEL-CIO called the Industrial Union Department designated Ravenswood a special project, a label applied to labor's most crucial fights, such as the recent Eastern Airlines and Greyhound campaigns.

Presents several editorials which discuss different subjects. "The Solid Ground of Argument," which discussed a series of articles on U.S. politics; "Tilting at Coal Mines," which discussed issues concerning coal labor contracts in the U.S.

The editor, in this article, discusses the matter related to geopolitics. With the adherence of Yugoslavia to a modified form of the Tripartite Pact, German ruler Adolf Hitler has won another diplomatic success. But thanks to a spontaneous outburst of popular opposition, of a kind which is thrilling to see emerge in the browbeaten Balkans, his victory is only partial and may very well prove a Pyrrhic one. The personnel and set-up of the National Defense Mediation Board represent a victory for Sidney Hillman, associate director of the OPM for the labor movement, and for the New Deal. It was conceived as a means of stemming the growing reactionary drive for legislative curbs on the right to strike, and friends of labor have every assurance that it will not tarn into a strike-breaking instrument.

In this article, the author focuses on issues concerning American labor movements and trade unionism, specially in Oregon and Washington. He describes that the head of trade unionism might be considerd as the most drastic anti-labor legislation proposed in the U.S. for half a century. On the ballot in these two Far Western states is a pair of initiative measures drafted to annihilate the labor movement. Labor unions in the region would be reduced to empty shells. Strikes and boycotts would be rendered illegal. Unions would not be permitted to collect funds for political or economic action. Section 1 of the Oregon bill outlaws any strike or labor dispute not between would completely demolish the craft-union structure of the American Federation of Labor. The bill is not content merely to forbid strikes. It also forbids practically all other forms of trade-union activity.

This article focuses on the political developments in the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt has regained his prestige in Congress is indicated by the vagueness of the Congressional leaders about the date of adjournment. Whew the revolt was in full swing, they did not hesitate to say that Congress wanted to go home, now it is up to the President. The spending-lending bill is assured of passage, the wage-hour bill will pass at least in the House, although it may bog down in conference. A knotty problem faces the conference committee dealing with the wage-hour bill. The A. F. of L. has put itself on record as insisting on a uniform minimum wage throughout the country, the Southern Senators have threatened a filibuster rather, than yield on the right of Southern textile mills, lumber mills, and pecan factories to pay starvation wages.

The recent decision of the U.S. Congress of Industrial 0rganizations (C.I.O.) to establish a union of federal workers has again brought the question of the government's relation to its more than 800,000 civil employees into the public forum. The U.S. government's claim to special privileges as an employer does not merely limit employee activity in the larger field of action; through restrictive laws and practices it has also served to deprive the government worker of adequate redress when official superiors have disciplined him for organization activity specifically guaranteed him by law. There has been a surprising number of such cases, not only in past years but during the present Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This article reports on a large number of employees suffering from silicosis at Caterpillar Tractor Co. located in Peoria, Illinois. Holding basic patents, Caterpillar Tractor Co. is the largest manufacturer of track-type tractors in the world. Under the laws of the state of Illinois the workers knew that the company was in the safe side. The silica dust in the Caterpillar foundry was so thick that the men operating hand trucks collided in the main gangway. There were no masks at all, except for the two men operating the pressure hoses in the sandblast and no partitions separating the blasting and cleaning rooms from the rest of the foundry.

The article discusses American foreign policy. The U.S. State Department is on the defensive in the Bolivian affair. Two weeks ago, the American ambassador to Bolivia had sought to prevent the enactment of a new labor code in that country. This code guarantees to Bolivian workers rights as standard as collective bargaining and as elementary as regular payment of wages. Last week, this report from Bolivia was twice denied by the U.S. State Department, publicly rebuking Ernesto Galana, Mexican-born thief of the Division of Labor and Social Information of the Pan-American Union.

Mentioned here is editorial's paragraphs highlighting the political and economic issues. Evidently the Administration has been inspired to get behind the Wagner Labor Disputes bill in its new form by the hope of creating a preventive which would nip the summer growth of strikes in the bud. What the bill gives to the trade unions is hardly specific enough, and certainly not substantial enough, to justify them in accepting that preventive. Governor Blanton Winship has yielded to the pressure of big-business interests in Puerto Rico and has vetoed the workmen's compensation act, the draft of which he had himself submitted to the insular legislature with an urgent request for its approval. The new act is imperative because of the failure of the existing law to protect the workers.

The article focuses on the resignation of Ralph S. Kelly, chief of the Field Division of the U.S. General Land Office, in a letter sharply attacking the Department of the Interior for its administration of Colorado oil-shale fields. Kelly declares that these 800,000 acre fields contain more than 40000000000 barrels of oil, worth at least as many dollars, and that the large oil interests are endeavoring to secure titles by fraud and failure to comply with the requirements of the U.S. mining laws.

The measure in California to repeal the criminal syndicalism law was defeated in committee by a vote of 17 to 2. There it was left for dead but the struggling sense of decency in the State was embodied in the measure, and that cannot be so easily disposed of. The bill will be bought on again, and will continue to be discussed until California ceases to be known all over the country as a place where men are jailed for mere membership in an organization without having done or said anything contrary to law.

The article focuses on Wisconsin. For a time Wisconsin lit new peaks at every legislative session. The commission idea kindled a flame then new to the traditionized vision that the determining of conditions of certain relationships on a basis of legal precedent is fantastic and must be replaced by administrative interpretation on the basis of present economic and social fact. Followed a statute said in 1911 to be the greatest piece of labor legislation in the U.S., the Industrial Commission to administer the new Workmen's Compensation Act and all other labor laws the first instance in the country of the State assuming to control and regulate health and safety of the workers.

Presents letters to the editor about economic and political issues affecting the world. Attitudes of workers towards the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations law; Harm done by American Legion members; Use of African troops by the French in the occupied parts of Germany.

This article focuses on the socio-political issues. The Board of Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington announces a gift of 100,000 from ex-Senator William A. Clark to perpetuate the William A. Clark Prize Awards, which since 1907 have been important items in the life and usefulness of the Corcoran Gallery. So large a gift, hardly to be paralleled elsewhere, should not be overlooked by any one interested in the future of the American art. The League of Spanish Workers sent out an appeal to the proletariat of the world for a boycott of Spanish commerce, to force the Government to renounce its campaign of terrorism against the working class.

The article focuses on the strikes by mine workers in the United States. The United Mine Workers have finally won their long fight for reasonably adequate federal mine-safety legislation. The U.S. Congress has adopted, and the President will doubtless approve, the measure sponsored by Representative Samuel McConnell of Pennsylvania. Now, for the first time, federal inspectors will be authorized to close down a mine and order the workers out if they find imminent danger of-disaster. They should therefore be able to prevent such disasters as the explosion which last year took the lives of 119 miners at West Frankfort, Illinois. The new "mine-safety act" is about the only pro-labor legislation that Congress has enacted in the last three or four years.

This article presents a discussion on various miscellaneous topics on the United States. The session of the Presbyterian General Assembly, which is at Saratoga, has the most striking characteristic, that it concerns hardly more the Presbyterians themselves than the Congregational body. Another update states that much has been written recently regarding the question whether the Musical Mutual Protective Union could succeed in preventing the famous Strauss orchestra, on account of the Alien-Contract-Labor Law.