Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Modern-day featherbedding got its grip on industry as labor's answer to oldtime management abuses such as the speedup, spread far and wide during World War II's crash production and cost-plus contracts. It is by no means an American phenomenon; featherbedding pervades many segments of labor in foreign countries, is often disguised behind the Iron Curtain to create the illusion of full employment...
...combat such excesses. The Taft-Hartley Act rules out payments "for services which are not performed," but the Supreme Court has held featherbedding legal as long as workers perform any service-or just stay on the job. Moreover, management is often embarrassed by featherbedding on its own level. The American Institute of Management reported that 90% of U.S. companies suffer from featherbedding in the executive suite-managers who are kicked upstairs to show jobs, vice presidents (and their nephews) who have little to do after a company merges...
When it comes to taking goods in return, the Chinese are far more efficient. As a shipment of 4,500 tons of South American cotton arrived at a Chinese port recently, U.S.-trained Chinese inspectors swarmed over it, carefully grading each" bale. The Chinese are tough and unbending in trade negotiations, often cancel contracts for no obvious reason. Said a Frenchman who packed his bags and returned home from Red China without a franc's worth of trade: "The atmosphere is decidedly bad for doing business...
...take sadistic pleasure in trumpeting our stupidities and ineptitudes. What makes The Ugly American a bestseller? Why do the movies hurry it into extravagant production? It is that mood that leads men to spend two whole weeks making a thoroughgoing and complete examination of the educational system of the Soviets (through Russian interpreters) and come home to laud its strongest points while comparing them with our weakest...
...bullying of the intellectuals" during the white-hot heyday of McCarthyism, trained no fewer than five topnotch university presidents, including Harvard's Nathan Pusey and Wesleyan's Victor Butterfield. In his new book, Academic Procession (Columbia; $4), President-emeritus Wriston, now head of Columbia's American Assembly and the Council on Foreign Relations, pleads for a continuing faith in the ever-revolutionary ideals of U.S. democratic education. He also deplores some of the fancy new means that may be obscuring education's real ends. The fact that the word "curriculum" comes from the Latin word...