The Daily Worker

MINERS' UNION
FIGHTS VERDICT
3 Young Workers Face
10 Year Sentences
PITTSBURGH, Pa., Nov. 22.-The conviction of Charles Guynn, 27-year-old organizer of the National Miners' Union, on a charge of "criminal syndicalism" in Ohio was vigorously denounced in a statement issued today from the national headquarters of the N. M. U., 119 Federal St., Pittsburgh.

Guynn, together with Lillian Andrews and Tom Johnson, the latter two members of the Young Communist League of Cleveland, were Wednesday found guilty by a jury in Common Pleas court in St. Clairsville, Ohio, which rendered its verdict after "deliberating" fully eleven minutes.

As a result Guynn and the other two defendants face sentences of 10 years imprisonment each and fines of $5,000. They were arrested for speaking at an August 1 anti-war demonstration in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a town dominated completely by the steel and coal barons.

Attack On Workers.

"The conviction of Guynn," the N. M. U. statement said, "is part of the employers' nation-wide offensive against the workers, which is being accompanied by increasing speed-up methods, sharp wage cuts and vicious attacks on the drive to organize the thousands of unorganized workers throughout the country.

"This organizer is hated by the coal operators especially in West Virginia and Ohio, where since the birth of the National Miners' Union, he has been in the forefront in the fight to organize the miners in the gun-ruled towns of the coal barons.

General Terror Drive.

"This verdict," the N.M.U. statement says, "is the latest link in the bosses' chain--Gastonia, where seven members of the working class face terms as high as 20 years for attempting to organize the southern cotton mill workers; Woodlawn, Pa., where three workers go to prison for five years on Nov. 26 for trying to organize the workers of the Jones & Laughlin steel plants; Cheswick, Pa., where Salvatore Accorsi, an Italian coal miner faces death in the electric chair on framed up charges of killing a coal and iron policeman after a Sacco-Vanzetti memorial meeting was broken up by them in August, 1926.

"The verdict of the coal and steel bosses' jury," the statement concludes, "will not stop the fight to build the National Miners' Union."