ustxtxb_obs_1967_07_21_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

walk off their jobs,” Alice responded: “We haven’t pitshed any workers back in the fields.. . . Those things just haven’t happened. The accusations are absolutely false.” Three of the Rangers made similar denials in an interview with the Houston Post. As to the arrest of Magdaleno Dimas, a union supporter who required medical care after being taken into custody by Rangers, Dimas was armed with a rifle when he was arrested, according to Ranger Tol Dawson. Did the Rangers treat Dimas more roughly than was necessary? Not at all, said Dawson and fellow Ranger Jack Van Cleve. “We heard he was in a car wreck,” Dawson said of Dimas’ injuries. GOV. CONNALLY has maintained throughout the 13 months of the labor dispute a public stance of neutrality, and particularly so in recent weeks. Last month, in two separate meetings, Connally was urged by labor leaders at closed meetings to take a role in resolving the crisis in the Valley and to pull the Rang. ers out of Starr county. The governor has declined to intervene on either count. Kircher and Roy Evans, the secretary-treasurer of the Texas AFL-CIO, suggested that Connally consider requesting the National Arbitration Assn. to investigate the situation and establish procedures for a union representation elections. This is a step that was taken last year in California by Gov. Edmund Brown. Connally declined. Five days later Connally was visited by Padilla, the U.F.W.O.C. vice-president; July 21, 1967 workers was the Rev. John McCarthy of the San Antonio Catholic archdiocese. Opposing the bill in Washington were Charles M. Creuziger, president of the Vegetable Growers Assn. of America; Richard T. O’Connell, secretary of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives; and Matt Triggs, the assistant legislative director of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Williams, saying he had tried twice by telephone and three times by letter to get Ranger Captain Allee to answer the charges made against Allee, invited the Ranger to testify in Washington, his expenses to be paid by the subcommittee. Alice said he would go if his superiors ordered him to. D.P.S. director Homer Garrison told the Senators that it would be improper for Allee to testify, since some of the persons who had charged the Rangers with brutality in Starr county have legal actions pending against them and, thus, “it wuold be improper and in violation of guidelines set forth by the Valley, and more particularly in Starr county comprise the most powerful testimony this subcommittee ever received as to the need to extend the established rules and procedures of the collective bargaining provisions of the National Labor Relations Act to the farm industry.” THE MOST immediate effect of the Texas hearings was an announcement last week by the Labor Dept. that farm workers’ strikes were being certified to exist at six Starr county farms and, therefore, those farms can not use green carders from Mexico, other than such workers as had been employed before July 10. Ray Rochester, general manager of La Casita Farm, one of the six farms cited, said he doubted the Labor Dept. move would affect his operations much since “Generally, we use more citizen U.S. help than most other growers.” Gilbert Padilla, the U.F. W.O.C.’s leader was elated by the Labor Dept’s announcement, however. “We are here to stay,” he said. The other five designated Starr county farms are Sun-Tex Farms, Griffin and Brand \(Trophy and Stahl \(Rancho Grande and Ringgold has lately made it known that it certified the six farms last year as struck and has referred no ‘Workers there in the last 13 months, since La Huelga was begun. Back in Washington Senator Williams said the Valley hearings had been “inspiring” and have provided “the impetus we need to pass” his bill to bring farm workers under the NLRA. Subcommittee sources told. the New York Times that they believe the treatment of farm workers by Texas officials will encourage Congress to act more swiftly on the legislation Williams proposes. The subcommittee held more hearings on the bill last week in Washington, hearing testimony from two of the nation’s most important labor leaders, George Meany and Walter Reuther, in support of the farm workers and in favor of Williams’ bill. Williams cites their testifying as “one more evidence that this . . . is an idea whose time has come.” Meany, president of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, said that farm workers, because they are not covered by the NLRA, “must do what other workers had to do in the dark ages of labor historyscratch and claw and dig out their own little clearing in a hostile jungle.” He said that the Texas farm workers, in the last year, have not been striking-about wages or working conditions, “but for the fundamental right to bargain collectively. No worker in interstate commerce has had to strike fpr that right since 1935. . .. Simple justice, we contend would extend that right to farm workers as well,” said Meany. The statement of Walter Reuther, United Auto Workers president, was presented by Jack Conway, executive director of the industrial union department. Also testifying in support of the farm I N OTHER Washington developments U.S. Sen. John Tower is pushing for reopening the subcommittee hearings later this month. The hearings had been scheduled to conclude on July 13. Tower says there are other witnesses who want to be heard. It was not known whether Williams will accede to Tower’s request. Meanwhile, in Texas, four Rangers including Captain Allee have been named as defendants in a suit filed by the Texas Council of Churches alleging that the officers infringed the right of the Rev. and Mrs. Ed Krueger and two .other persons who have sought to observe the labor sitD.P.S. director Garrison and Captain Allee have issued denials of the various charges of misconduct made against the Rangers. Garrison says “for as long as there is a state of Texas, there will be Texas Rangers.” Allee has called the charges “false and libelous.” He has called the allegations of Ranger brutality and misconduct that were made at the subcommittee hearing here “just a bunch of perjuries. This is stuff concocted by the union. They are just making this stuff up. Nobody has abused anyone. Everybody has their day and I’m going to have mine,” Allee said. “They’re going to have to prove those accusations to me and the general public. I intend to follow this thing through.” As to a statement made in a Washington radio interview last week by William Kircher, the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, that Rangers had “shoved workers back into the fields when they tried to U.S. Supreme Court for conduct of peace officers for an officer to make public statements that would be pertinent to such cases before the defendants have had their day in court.” Williams retorted that Allee “did voluntarily appear in a civil suit [earlier in the week of the subcommittee’s Texas hearings] brought by the growers against the strikers as a grower witness and relate, as part of his testimony, the events we expected him to testify to. In view of this, it would appear that, in Ranger interpretation, the prohibition against officers in making public comment on pending cases only runs to Senate subcommittees and has no applicability to local civil cases brought by growers.” Allee, Williams said, “leaves the record uncontroverted” regarding the allegations of brutality. How ever if District Attorney Lloyd does submit a transcript of the civil suit that evidently would enter the Rangers’ denials into the subcommittee’s record. Allee and Garrison Deny the Allegations