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Show THE 3 SEARCHLIGHT Those Racketeering-(Continued from preceding paye) and the employer by eliminating and abuse, without erasing any legitimate gains.” racketeers of labor’s Sounds rather plausible, doesn’t it? The News plays a hefty role of angelic rescuer, saving Utah labor from perdition. But analysis of that paragraph reveals the same tried and effective technique of enemies of organized labor experienced by labor unions throughout the country. The News wants to ‘‘protect’’ labor’s ‘foains’’, falsely implying that it approves those gains. The News always has been the most obdurate and unrelenting foe of labor unions and collective bargaining in Utah. The manner in which it wants to ‘‘protect’’ labor’s ‘“oains’’? is to destroy the substanee of the protection. The News wants to eliminate ‘‘racketeering’’ where no raeketeering exists. Why? Only to attach a little odium to the good name of Utah labor. The News doesn’t say directly that somebody is racketeering. It merely imphes it. By indirection it maligns and lbels the organization of Utah workers, without beine honorable enough—forthright enough—to name names, places, dates, individuals, and without submitting even a pretense of bona fide evidence. The News and its associated conspirators habitually charge Utah labor with racketeering. But the News and the other maligners care- fully refrain from being explicit and definite enough so that labor unions and the victimized individuals may bring suit for, and obtain damages. THE REAL RACKETEERS The men who actually run the Deseret News and control its policy—J. R. Clark, A. K. Bowen, and Orval Adams, know precisely how far they may go in spreading malicious lies and wicked propaganda against labor unions in Utah—and in the Nation—and yet escape criminal and eivil lability. Among their many avocations Bowen and Clark are lawyers, and know most of the tricks of that none too forthright game. Mark Petersen and Dave Robinson are mere chore boys who know and respond to ‘‘their masters’ voice’. The combination might well be referred to as an editorial ‘‘bull gang’’, to borrow an expressive phrase from the mining industry. We charge the GENTLEMEN referred to in this article with deliberate lying when they assert that AFL—CIO—Rail unions in this State are guilty of racketeering. We charge also that such unconscionable misrepresentations are made for the express purpose of weakening the labor unions so that profits of corporations may be increased at the expense of wages at the opportune time. If we define racketeering as unholy activity bordering perilously near the line of unlawful conduct, and engaged in for illegitimate purposes —then the Deseret News and its policy makers easily come within that definition. They, more than any other aggregation in Utah may justly be labelled RACKETEERS. The Deseret News and its associated corporations—corporations it serves with a sineleness of purpose—are inveterate enemies of collective bargaining. They have been so for uncounted years. We have heretofore pointed out that the News has ‘‘saved’’ a sum estimated at nearly $100,000 a year by reason of its low wage scales—one of the numerous antisocial products of non-union shops. The sugar interests affiliated with the Deseret News—sister corporations—paid Utah workers a base wage pared to the base wage of $4.60 a day of organized as com- sugar re- finery workers at Crockett, California, of $7.80 a day, both figures representing the wage status of respective refinery workers in the period immediately before the outbreak of the war with Japan. The ZCMI, another sister corporation, paid wages to some of its permanent employees as low as $55 a month during the same period. The unions have been attempting to correct that deplorable wage setup of the News and its sister corporations, for several years. Hence the savage attacks of that unprincipled paper on organizations and individuals who have endeavored to rescue (Continued those on unfortunate page 7) Utah |