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From The Chow LInes To The Unemployment Lines

By VVAW

VVAW/WSO is an active part of the growing movement of unemployed workers. Uniting with groups like UWOC, VVAW/WSO sees its task of uniting the veterans movement with other working people, both employed and unemployed. As a fighting veterans organization, we have a special role to play: in addition to fighting for jobs for veterans, we need to fight back against the long-standing attempts of the bosses to try and "divide and conquer" by pitting vets against other worker in competition for a few bullshit jobs, and also to raise the point that having just got out of one imperialist war, it isn't going to "solve" our unemployment problems to get into another one.

From the get-go, vets have been hit hard by unemployment. From the chow lines of the war in Indochina, where GIs were used as the cannon fodder of big business, vets have been marched straight back home to the unemployment lines, where we are now being used as the shock-troops of the army of the unemployed. Stuck with a loss of seniority time due to military service, a lack of real job training, and 600,000 plus less-than-honorable discharges, vets have an unemployment rate way above the national average. For minority vets, that rate is doubled again!

But we are doing more than just talking about the problem. Joining with groups like UWOC, we are fighting to do something about it. One of the many examples of this was on March 22nd in Milwaukee where VVAW/WSO helped build a "Jobs or Income" action. There, some 100 people gathered on Wisconsin Ave, the main drag in Milwaukee, to march ended at the main plant being struck by the meatcutters union, the point was again made that employed and unemployed, veterans and non-vets have to stand together in unity to fight these attacks on us all.

What is happening in Milwaukee around the unemployment struggle, and what VVAW/WSO is doing about it in a lot of other cities, is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a sleeping giant among us--our united mass action. And as the layoffs go on, the struggles of the unemployed are rapidly waking this giant up. We in VVAW/WSO are going to be playing an ever greater role in this process--by building the fight for "Jobs or Income For All!"