Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Is the Bulletin a Scab Paper? (1986)

Workers Vanguard No. 395 (17 January 1986)

Is the Bulletin a Scab Paper?

Workers Vanguard reporters and salesmen at the January 4 union rally in solidarity with the Chicago Tribune strike found the militant Trib workers to be quite interested in socialist literature. We also noticed that supporters of the recently Healyite Workers League were skulking about, curiously unaggressive in pushing their raison d’etre, the twice-weekly Bulletin.

Meanwhile, a WV salesman was approached by several strikers who, misinformed, protested that he was distributing a publication printed by non-union labor. The WV salesman immediately showed the union “bug” prominently displayed in our masthead and, reassured, each of the striking workers bought a copy of the paper. We concluded that this misunderstanding arose because some fake-left outfit was, grotesquely, handing out literature without a union label at the rally – an intolerable insult to the strikers whose struggle is one for the survival of unionism in the printing industry. Recalling the WL’s furtive behavior at this rally, we checked out the Bulletin and, sure enough, found no union bug. Is the Bulletin a scab newspaper?