Workers World, Vol. 12, No. 2, January 29, 1970
Unless the most serious view of the Yablonski assassination is taken, the gravest consequences for the cause of American labor and the working people in general will ensue.
Because the American trade union bureaucracy has been universally discredited as an authentic, militant representative of the workers, this is no reason to permit the capitalist class to palm off a government plot to assassinate a labor leaders as a mere clique struggle unconnected with the burning political issues of the day.
Certain progressive elements in this country made a mistake when they passed up the Kennedy assassination as a more or less accidental phenomenon and swallowed the official line on it, while some others really thought of it as signifying a vendetta in the ruling clique but without political significance. In reality the Kennedy assassination heralded an era of intensified use of naked violence by the ruling class both at home and abroad. These elements missed the point at that time. And they are missing it again now.
The most alarming aspect of the Yablonski assassination is not that the capitalist class has belittled its importance and relegated it to a tenth-rate issue in the country. That they would try to do this should go without saying. Of the greatest importance, however, is that the official labor movement has had practically nothing to say about it, except in the most inane and innocuous way. True, certain columnists have dropped hints here and there about collusion between the Boyle faction and the big operators and a reference occasionally to the murder of King and Kennedy. But that is about all.
It is plain that the ruling class would like to bury the whole matter, shed crocodile tears for Yablonski and sanctimoniously bemoan “corruption in big labor.” And there seems to be very little opposition to that from almost any source.
All the more necessary is it then to put the whole matter straight before the public, without any equivocation whatever.
The murder of Yablonski was a political assassination, carried out by the U.S. government through its basic instrumentalities such as the CIA and the FBI, its underlings, undercover agents and hired assassins. As such, it differs in no fundamental respect from the assassination of the Kennedys, of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X and from the execution of the many Panther members, the latest victim being Fred Hampton.
As in each one of the above murders, scapegoats will be found. And whether guilty or not guilty of actually pulling the trigger, they will be used to cover up the trail of the real criminals and quiet the suspicions of those still unsatisfied. The FBI has now arrested Paul E. Gilly, Aubran W. Martin and Claude E. Vealey in Cleveland, Ohio and is apparently preparing a case against them. But no one should be fooled by this attempt to repeat the Oswald procedure. And no one’s eyes should be diverted to the inner union fight exclusively, if it should turn out that the three men are connected to the Boyle machine.
To reduce the Yablonski assassination to the result of a mere factional feud between two groups fighting for power in the union is to tell a half-truth, to deceive the miners, to lie to the American labor movement in general and to the whole world. The federal government, and the FBI in particular, knew as early as last June of the bitter struggle in the miners’ union for the control of the organization. Considering that Yablonski himself had broadly intimated that he feared for his life and that the virulent character and temper of the election struggle had gone beyond anything that had been previously envisioned for such a campaign, it would be utterly impossible for the CIA and the FBI not to know what was in the offing.
Life magazine reported in its January 23 issue: “Yablonski, almost daily, charged Boyle with criminal behavior, while threats against Yablonski’s life came so regularly that after the first few weeks they stopped being counted, much less reported. ...
“’We went to the Justice Department, too,’ Dr. Wells, a close associate of Yablonski, said. ‘All we wanted them to do was announce they were sending in observers. Hell, they didn’t even have to do it. Just announcing it would have helped. John Mitchell didn’t even return our calls.’”
One must also consider the gravity of the charges made by Yablonski. It is important to remember: (1) that Boyle withdrew from the union treasury $1.5 million to pay 100 percent of certain salaries upon retirement; (2) that Boyle withdrew about $1 million to finance his own campaign; (3) that the union had in 1962 about $30 million in investments which had mysteriously dwindled by 1968 to less than $24 million; and (4) that Boyle was somehow involved in the UMWA convictions of conspiracy with large coal companies to squeeze out small ones.
The magnitude and seriousness of these charges could not possibly have escaped the attention of all the government agencies charged with investigation such things. Always on previous occasions these agencies had jumped into the fray with speed and alacrity and without any invitation at all when a union was involved.
Only in this case have they suddenly put on a false face of neutrality and a pose of nonintervention. The truth of the matter lies in the fact that Yablonski, as we stated in our previous installment, transgressed the ruling class’ prescribed limits of opposition within the established relationship between the UMWA and the mine operators, who are in turn controlled by the steel trusts.
It was at the behest of the steel trust that the government executed Yablonski. To put it in any other way is to hide the true significance of the murder. Yablonski was by no means a militant leader. He had actually been a part of the establishment. His crime at the moment was that in the struggle against the Boyle machine he threatened to upset the established equilibrium between capital and labor in a key, basic industry. And this could have repercussions throughout the whole country.
Therein lies the key to the murder of Yablonski. It was a preventive move in anticipation of bigger working class struggles ahead. The progressive, left papers in this country have failed to see the intimate connection between the Yablonski assassination and the pattern of all the previous political assassinations in this epoch of unbridled reaction and repression unleashed by the government.
The silence of the labor bureaucracy on the matter of the Yablonski assassination is as self-defeating as it is reprehensible. Right now all the top leaders of the AFL-CIO, and of other unions as well, are feigning neutrality and impartiality in the matter, if they talk about it at all.
But this is only their public posture. Privately they are all shaken up by it. For they cannot but recognize this as a warning to them by the establishment.
Certain columnists in the capitalist press are interpreting the official silence of the labor leaders as part of a tactical approach by the Meany and Reuther forces to win the UMWA over to their respective sides. Cogent as this argument may appear to be, it is extraordinarily narrow and basically false. Certainly Meany and Reuther are competing with each other to win over the UMWA (which for a long time has been independent). But these leaders know only too well that the industrial-financial oligarchy of this country is in the process of unleashing a giant anti-labor offensive, of which the assault upon the General Electric workers is merely a curtain-raiser.
They, more than most others, know the intimate relationship between the assassination and the critical situation in the country as a whole, with the war in Vietnam on the one side and the Black liberation struggle on the other.
The inherent threat of many aspects of the struggle merging into a giant struggle of the workers – one working class struggle – against the capitalist class is what lies at the bottom of the Yablonski murder. It is the fear of this coming struggle that haunts the ruling class. The crime of the labor leadership is that knowing all this, they prefer to remain silent. And it is backwardness on the part of the radical press not to be able to see it and not to sound the alarm. Making vague hints about benefits accruing to the coal and steel companies from the assassination, as some of the left papers have done, is inadequate and misleading. Of course the coal barons and the steel tycoons stand to benefit from the assassination, and in fact have conspired about it. But this would have been impossible unless it were done with the consent of, and through, the government itself. This is so because of the enormous significance of the case. It only obscures the political character of the assassination to dwell merely on the corruption of the Boyle clique – and to make merely the charges we have listed above. The fundamental issue in the assassination is the role of the capitalist class.
Probably the worst aspect of the assassination is the manner in which Yablonski’s opposition group – or what is left of it – is conducting its fight-back strategy. Every serious student of the trade union movement knows it is the weakest of unions which permits its lawyer to handle its general political and trade unions affairs. Permitting Joseph L. Rauh, Yablonski’s lawyer, to continue the suit begun by Yablonski to cancel the election results is one thing; broadening his authority to conduct the general struggle of the miners against Boyle’s clique, against the operators and the government, is something else again. And that is precisely what Rauh is set to do.
Every miner who knows anything about his union knows that the UMWA more than any other union within the framework of the labor establishment had put up a remarkable struggle against government intervention in the internal affairs of his union. And this in many ways signifies a greater degree of independence from the capitalist state structure. It is often forgotten by so-called labor experts of the bourgeoisie, but not by the ruling class, that the UMWA was the only union in the Executive Council of the AFL which voted against signing the non-Communist oath as required by the Taft-Harley Law to get the so-called services of the National Labor Relations Board.
John L. Lewis and the UMWA took this principled stand as a demonstration of the union’s independence from supervision by the capitalist state. The UMWA split from the AFL precisely on this issue. Joseph Rauh’s strategy is a complete break with Lewis’ strategy. In his effort to help the Yablonski faction get out of the crisis the UMWA finds itself in, he is employing methods which will drive the union deeper into crisis, if not ruin it altogether.
On January 15, Rauh called a news conference and roundly denounced Labor Secretary George Schulz for his icy indifference to the complaints or threats against Yablonski during the election campaign and then called upon the Labor Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department for a full-scale investigation into the Yablonski assassination.
That was like asking the fox to look into what happened in the chicken coop. No one knows this better than Rauh himself. Asking the Justice Department to look into the matter is really asking President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell to do it. Both Nixon and Mitchell regard Rauh (who is a leading figure in the Americans for Democratic Action) as an ultra-liberal and an “extremist.” And Rauh in turn regards them as anti-labor and reactionary.
Could he possibly be serious? By asking a government investigation by the Nixon administration, whether it be through the so-called Labor Secretary, the Attorney General or the Treasury Secretary (under whose jurisdiction is the Internal Revenue Service), he is in reality asking for a greater stranglehold by the government over the union. And this would destroy whatever independence the union still has. Should all these government agencies descend upon the union like a flock of vultures upon their prey the results would be entirely predictable.
It is no wonder that the vicious anti-labor Senate McClellan Committee has suddenly taken an interest in the welfare of the miners’ union – as though in response to Rauh’s call.
Only the miners can save the miners’ union. Only they can cleanse the union of corruption and undemocratic procedures and break the stranglehold of government control through which the coal barons and the steel tycoons dominate the lives of the miners.
But the miners along cannot do it. No single group of workers, no matter how powerful, can fight the entire capitalist establishment and its terrorist apparatus – the CIA-FBI Complex. But the first and most important duty of every progressive trade union militant is to rouse the masses of the people to the enormity of the crime committed against the miners’ union by the assassination and its significance for the whole working class. It is necessary to pinpoint the assassin.
It is necessary to show the intimate connection between the plight of the miners’ union and the general ferment and upheaval in the country arising out of the Vietnam war, skyrocketing inflation, the lowering of the living standards of the masses of the workers and the conspiracy of the ruling class to unleash a general offensive against the workers – as evidenced by the General Electric strike. Above all, it is necessary to show that the Yablonski assassination was carried out in the same pattern and by substantially the same forces who executed the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. Our first duty is to shed light on this.
January 19, 1970
Last updated: 11 May 2026