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Show THE SEARCHLIGHT Those Racketeering Charges!! (Continued from preceding page) interests they represent at the expense of the wages of the employee side of the same enterprises. They recognize the fact that workers have succeeded in diverting a small proportion of corporation profits into increased wages. They want to reverse that process or at least be ina position to do so at the close of the war. ‘They know very well that they cannot make a successtul assault on the main structure of collective bargaining. So by indirection they propose to make collective bargaining a dead letter. They plan to destroy workingmen’s established legal rights piece meal—one at a time. GUS AND CLYDE During the closing days of the 1943 legislative sessions, while Gus P. Backman, Stanley N. Stephenson, and Clyde C. Edmonds were putting the screws on legislators in their abortive campaign to crack Labor’s protective armor, Gus readily admitted—when cornered— that there was ‘‘no racketeering by Stan Duffin, John Loftis, Fullmer Latter, or any of our Utah boys’’. But he didn’t let the public and the Legislature know that. After helping spread the vile propaganda, Gus made no open effort to counteract it. For a while Gus tried to infer that Labor’s encounter with Clyde Edmonds’ ‘‘ Milk White Kiges’’ bordered on the unethical, but he promptly receded from that position when shown that Clyde himself was the over-bright boy who had circumvented and flouted National and State labor laws in his dealings with his employees. Thereupon Gus—in the approved style of paid maligners—rested his case on the alleged racketeering of Dave Beck in Seattle, twelve hundred miles from Salt Lake. He couldn’t specify just what racketeering Dave had indulged in. He contented himself with asserting that Dave must not be permitted to have any influence in Utah—therefore we must take the substance out of Utah’s labor laws. It was pointed out that even if Dave Beck were all Gus represented him to be, he could have little or nothing to do with Utah’s industrial setup, and that it looked like Gus was ‘‘straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel’’. It appeared that Gus had invoked the tried and tested propaganda dodge of trying to brush off a fancied fly speck a few thousand miles from home as the motive for demolishing the labor laws of this State. Gus was reduced to silencee—an unusual condition for Gus. He would not produce one iota of evidence, or even probability, of racketeering by labor in Utah. PROPAGANDA AND DECEIT But untortunately legislators and the pubhe are not aware of the hypocrisy and infamy of the Backman-Stephenson-Edmonds _ technique. The public has been propagandized into the idea the Utah labor leaders and much — of their following may be only an aggregation of racketeers. Representatives of privilege above referred to carefully cultivate that false opinion. It comes in handy when an assault 1s to be made on the hard-won gains of Utah workers. Indeed, the three individuals referred to are part and parcel of a predatory clique, which ineludes numerous absentee-owned corporations, often named in the Searchlight, which devote themselves to increasing corporate profits at the expense of the people of Utah. The Deseret Evening News is their chief propaganda weapon. The editorial page of that house organ of pillaging interests drips with the shme of malicious labor-baiting. For instance, the Searchlight had occasion to castigate that miserable sheet a month ago after it had deliberately implied that Utah workers lacked patriotism. Again, on March 8th in its lead editorial while recommending a legislative attack on collective bargaining, the News said: “Amend Utah’s act’ to protect the (Continued one-sided ‘little Wagner rights of labor, the public, on following page) |