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Show SHOWS NQ SIGN OF SETTLEMENT DIRECTOR DECLARES WORKERS ARE ALL WILLING TO FIGHT IT OUT REGARDLESS OF TIME Operators Assert Contributions From Outside Are Insufficient to Meet Expense of Their Soup Kitchens Providence, R. I. The Rhode Island textile strike, now starting its eighth week, has developed Into a war of attrition. at-trition. This is the opinion expressed turers and workers. "We will fight it out on these lines If it takes all summer," said William H. Derrick of the Amalgamated Textile Tex-tile Workers, head of the strike organization or-ganization in the Pawtuxet valley, where more than one-third of the 18r 000 operators idle in the state are ordinarily or-dinarily employed. Derrick announced his objective to be a forty-eight-hour week, no reduction in wages and no discrimination against strikers returning re-turning to work. "Just as fast as the employee demonstrate that they want to go back or any considerable number num-ber of them the mills will be opened " said Edward F. Walker, secretary of the Rhode Island Textile association. The manufacturers propose a 20 per cent wage reduction and fifty-four-hour week. Approximately a score of their mills are closed. Derrick claims that the Pawtuxet valley strikers could carry on indefinitely indef-initely without work. Seven soup kitchens in as many mill villages feed thousands of strikers daily. Contributions continue to come in steadily from the outside, he says. The strikers continue to id well in houses owned by the mills. Strike headquarters in Arctic have been leased for a year. "If the mill owners evict our workers, work-ers, they will have to drive out about 30,000 persons, counting five to a family," fam-ily," Derrick declared. "Anyway, the weather is getting warmer and they can live in tents. Our organization U brand new, dating back to the time when the strike began, but our workers work-ers are a unit. We have the mill owners licked right now." Representatives of the mill owners responded that the "expenses of the free soup kitchens were three times the income of the strike fund daily, that hangers-on were being fed, while legitimate workers in many cities were not, and that only a small group desired to enter on a fight to the finish with the mills. Many, they said, wanted to go to work again, but were afraid of the "bludgeon and the blacklist." |