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pillows that were arranged there for sale. They took their naps under the counters, or on top of the counters. They stayed right there. Again, their people brought them food.
Well, it was very, very disturbing and distressing to the newly chosen French government. Blum nearly went out of his mind. He had really meant business. He wasn't attempting to cheat them. He was really goin to enforce the laws. The new Minister of Labor was Paul Ramadier who had been a Minister of Labor once before in some government. He had even been Premier at one time, I think, and has been Premier since. Curiously, I saw Ramadier only last summer (1952). He's an elderly man now, but much as he always was, a very intelligent man, an extremely intelligent person.
This sit-down strike in Paris was all written up in our papers as being something new.
The French papers, of course, and the dispatches from Paris, wrote it up as a new, unique technique, but I, of course, could not but remember that this was exactly what they had done in Akron, but with not so much publicity about it. I realized that there was an element in it that was probably spontaneous.
It happened that in July of '36 I was in Paris
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