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Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved

Background: VISNEWS June 5 filmed pickets outside the Beth David Hospital, New York, Manhattan, and interviewed Tom Mboya, chairman of the All-Africa People's Conference and general-secretary of the Kenya Federation, on charges of "Negro discrimination" in the 28-day-old New York Hospital strike.

Mboya, lending moral support at the picket line, said: "All the evidence available points to the fact that there is some discrimination in this particular question." He thought too that the discrimination had extended to Puerto Rican Workers.

Asked if he thought the strike would affect people in Africa, Mboya, replied: "Any conditions that affect labour anywhere in the world, has some effect in our own country - and the fact that a more developed country like this has a situation such as this, is the worst possible propaganda that can go out of this country to the rest of the world."
The strike of 3,500 non-professional workers at six private New York hospitals began May 8 - in defiance of a supreme court order forbidding strike action pending a hearing on the hospitals' application for an injunction.

The workers demand higher wages and recognition of their union, the Retail Drug Employees, as a bargaining agent for them. The hospitals, all non-profit making institutions, stand fast in their refusal to recognize the R.D.E.

On May 27 in an effort to end the strike, New York's Mayor Mr. Wagner, set up a fact-finding commission and mediation agency.