The Daily Worker

WORK RELIEF CUT IN YONKERS, N. Y.
Hold Meeting Today to Fight Wage Cut

YONKERS, N. Y., June 13.—One hundred jobless men are angrily protesting against $1 a day cut in their pay from the Yonkers Emergency Work Relief Bureau. The men are forced to give up a dollar a day for transportation to the Irvington Road job, when the train fare actually is only 37 cents.

The men demand free bus or truck transportation from a central point in Yonkers daily. A meeting of the men has been called by the Yonkers Unemployed Council today (Wednesday) at 8 o'clock in the Workers Center, 27 Hudson St., to plan action.

The men look on this wage cut as another step in the current campaign to cut the regular pay of $5 a day for city make-work. Recently the Yonkers Council of Civic Associations, a taxpayers' and landlords' organization, complained to the city welfare commissioner Nicholas J. Ebbitt that men on city make-work would not go back to the factories where the rate of pay was less. They asked a city wage cut. Ebbitt denied that any man offered a job in a factory was kept on the Emergency Relief payroll.

The men get three days work a week for a few months and another group is then put on. But many never have had a day's work since they registered. The men on the Irvington road job are on for six days a week for two weeks before they must give way to another group.

These are all family men, many of them skilled mechanics and workmen from such firms as Otis Elevator Works, Spreckles Sugar Corp., Habirshaw Cable (Phelps Dodge) and Smith Carpet Mills.