H.S.U. SPONSORS DEBATE ON MARITIME STRIKES

"The Executive Council of the I.S.U. are the real outlaws in this strike," charged Joseph Curran, leader of the current Eastern seaboard strike, to vice-president Halloran of the American Republic Lines, representing the interests of the shipowners in a discussion of the problem last night.

The debate, attended by three hundred people, was sponsored by the Labor Relations Committee of the Harvard Student Union in Emerson Hall.

"We make three specific demands," continued Curran, "Pay for our overtime work, better working conditions, and parity with the West Coast employees."

He claimed that the members of the Executive Council of the International Seaman's Union, whose word is final in all matters, were "stooges of the ship-owners"; that they made their decisions without submitting them to the members of the Union, and that they had entirely disregarded the results of a referendum submitted to the seamen.

Halloran retorted that "men working on American boats receive higher pay and work under better conditions than the seamen of any other nation."

He decried the fact that due to the strike foreign nations were making vast inroads in normally American trade, and asserted that the employees to whom he had spoken had no grievances against the ship owners but "had been intimidated into joining the strike.

Curran ridiculed the suggestion that sailors could be intimidated and charged that the replacements with which the employers were manning their vessels, were "farmers, scabs, totally incompetent for, and in fact dangerous to the operation of a sea-going vessel."