Fraser Fights City Hall and tak aby

New York (LNS)-Free speech, labor rights, feminism and socialism are on trial in Seattle, where a special city examiner and panel are hearing the first test of a clause in the local fair employment practices ordinance that bars job discrimination on the basis of political ideology. The case has pitted Clara Fraser, age 56, a long-time activist in socialist and feminist politics, against her former employer, Scattle's public utility company City Light. And it has also pitted two branches of city goverment against each other, with Fraser being represented by the Seattle Human Rights Department and City Light by the City Attorney's office.

الله

By the time Hearing Examiner Sally Pasette issues a decision sometime this month, it will have been almost five years since the incident that sparked the dispute, Fraser's firing on July 11, 1975, for what City Light termed incompetence. Fraser insists her firing was just the culmination of months of harassment because of her sex and political ideology. And to prove the point, she has taken the unusual step of offering specific testimony about her political beliefs.

"I believe that the profit system is immoral, illegal, unwarranted and utterly destructive to civilization and to human progress," she told the hearing panel, "and that it has to be replaced with a human system of democracy in the economy as well as in political forms....I believe it is necessary for women to learn solidarity and to work together with labor and with ethnic groups and with gay people and with everybody who feels themselves especially mistreated under-this system so that together there can be a consolidated movement for basic political change."

If testimony of this kind is extraordinary in personnel hearings, even more extraordinary is the fact that the person who is testifying to these political beliefs has won the support of such groups as the King County Labor Council AFL-CIO and the Hotel, Motel, Restaurant Employees & Bartenders Local 8' as well as the National Lawyers Guild and the United Feminist Front.

Fraser had been hired on June 4, 1973 to be City Light's first Education Coordinator. A few months later, she was assigned to organize the Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT) program, designed to bring women into the all-male trade. She was chosen for this task because of her experience as a feminist and civil rights leader, as an organizer and administrator, and as a professional developer of adult vocational projects for the disadvantaged. But these same qualities which initially made Fraser useful to City Light landed her in management's disfavor following a dramatic mass walkout by City Light employees in April of 1974, a year after she was hired. Although not herself a member of the union, Fraser became involved in the-dispute when members of Local 77 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers walked off the job on April 9, 1974, protesting the *proposed suspension of two foremen who purportedly returned late from a coffee break. At first, the union asked Fraser to get its side of the story out to non-union workers at City Light, and later asked her to join the walkout; she did both. Fraser's role did not end with the agreement between the workers, the Mayor, Wes Uhlman, and Gordon Vickery, then head of City Light, that ended the walkout after 11 days. Instead she became even more deeply involved..

As part of the agreement, City Light promised to negotiate an employee Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to replace a militaristic "Disciplinary Code" issued by City Light Superintendent Vickery a week before the walkout. At a mass meeting ending the strike, the dissident workers elected Fraser to their negotiating team, and the team, in turn, selected her as its chairperson, which made her the co-chair of the combined worker-management negotiating team; the

team, in turn, selected her as its chairperson, which made her the co-chair of the combined workermanagement negotiating committee. Another member of the committee who was head of City Light's labor relations policy procedure at the time accused Fraser of being a Communist and suggested that she go back to Russia.

Fraser also participated in the Mayor Uhlman Recall Campaign, an offshoot of the walkout. She criticized management's elimination of planned affirmative action training, and its inadequate safety

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Careless, Careless

(HerSay)—A woman clerk at a nuclear company in Barnwell, So. Carolina, has revealed that part of her job included paying speeding tickets for truckers who hauled low-level radioactive materials for her company. The woman, a former accounts receivable clerk at the Chem. Nuclear Company, told of her unusual job duty during a trial of nuclear protesters for trespassing. The woman reportedly said she even paid a fine for a trucker who, while driving drunk, jacknifed his rig while hauling radioactive cargo on Interstate 40.

The same clerk also told of a so-called "low level” waste dump which received a shipment so radioactive that the trucker who brought it had to drive directly into a waste ditch, where his load was immediately buried. That trucker, she said, died the following year-of cancer.

More Anita Bryant

New York (LNS)-Anita Bryant and the U.S. armed forces have both come under fire in the past as opponents of gay rights. But their cooperation on an evangelical TV show, although ostensibly unrelated to their shared antipathy for gays, has earned the Defense Department some new heat from lesbian and gay male activists.

Citing questions of "church-state separation" and "implicit government sanction of Bryant's anti-gay crusade," the National Gay Task Force has lodged a protest with President Jimmy Carter about the use of military facilities and personnel in the syndicated show, "Anita Bryant's Spectacular-My Little Corner of the World." In particular, according to Tom Burrows at the NGTF offices in New York, the protest noted that "part of the show was filmed at West 'Point with the West Point Glee-Club-singing in the -background, and General Westmoreland does an address in the middle of it."

So far, NGTF has received no response from the White House. But some recent comments from Anita Bryant herself indicate that the continuing protests have taken their toll: Claiming that her notoriety has cost her $500,000 in television contracts, Bryant lamented that "all of a sudden, I had to start buying choice meat instead of prime.

Not that Bryant and her family are about to land in the poorhouse. In fact, according to the Washington Post, she, her husband and their four children "still live in a sprawling Moorish mansion with tropical garden and swimming pool." And NGTF points out that in 1978 Anita Bryant Ministries raked in $968,000 in donations, "and spent only $150 on religious counseling, the alleged purpose for which it was incorporated."

NATIONAL NEWS

Snatcher Taken Aback

A purse snatcher in Los Angeles may think twice about his next victim: he picked on a group of four women who had just won approval from the city police to hold a "Women Take Back the Night" Rally.

The man grabbed the purse of one of the women as they were leaving a restaurant. The woman kept clutching her purse, however, while her colleagues jumped the snatcher and belted him with their own handbags.

The man, confused and afraid, attempted a getaway, only to be hotly pursued by his intended victims. Noreen Smith, one of the intended victims, quoted the would-be purse snatcher as crying out, "l can't believe it. What are you doing?”

Home Births Cut Profits

The director of Matrix, a California midwifery school, is charging that the recent upsurge of prosecutions against midwives-mostly in the State of California is "decidedly economic.

Michael Medvin's claims come on the heels of continued preliminary hearings into the second degree murder charge against Rosalie Tarpening, a Madera, California midwife. Tarpening, who has delivered more than 350 babies without incident, assisted at the birth of an infant last summer who died at birth of a congenital weakness. Tarpening is also charged with grand theft for taking money for her services, and with four counts of practicing medicine without a license.

Medvin says that the medical community at large is "alarmed" at the increasing number of home births around the United States. Some doctors, he says, have legitimate concerns about the health of their patients. Most obstetricians, he claims, however, are dead set against home birth because it would mean "an incredible loss of revenues" for baby doctors, and for hospitals with large obstetric wards.

Medvin says that the United States has an infant mortality-rate much higher than other Western European nations who use home birthing methods in their medical care system.

Matrix has trained about 30 people to be midwives since the Center opened a year and a half ago. Medvin admits, however, that the center keeps a "low profile" so that it does not provoke the attention or anger. of the traditional medical community.

Women Coaches Lose

(HerSay)—Women athletes may be on the increase, but women coaches aren't. A survey by a University of Southern California researcher of 335 colleges and universities across the U.S. has found that, while the number of coaches and assistant coaches for women increased by 37 percent from 1975 to 1979, most of the people filling those new jobs were men.

According to researcher Bonnie Parkhouse, the number of women coaches edged up only 3 percent during that period. The number of women head coaches, in the meantime, actually dropped by 20 percent because women coaches were replaced by

Tico.

Parkhouse has applied for a grant from the Department of Education to study-ways to slow the trend of hiring mainly male coaches for women's sports.