Word: bettereds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rouge, the strongest of three resistance groups fighting the Vietnamese and the pro-Hanoi government in Cambodia. The resistance is armed by China and led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a noncommunist who believes having the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh during an interim period leading to elections would be better than fighting them in the jungles...
...front of Communist Party headquarters in the Ukrainian city of Makeyevka, 5,000 miners in battered helmets, their faces and overalls black with coal dust, staged a sit-in to demand better working and living conditions; their ranks eventually swelled to almost 150,000 from 94 mines. Far to the east, in the Kuzbass in Siberia, the numbers were even greater. About 180,000 miners abandoned their pits to occupy central squares in nine cities, plastering reviewing stands with homemade signs proclaiming DOWN WITH BUREAUCRATS and KUZBASS: CLEAN AIR, MEAT FOR EVERYONE, WE DEMAND SOCIAL JUSTICE...
...strike spread with electrifying speed. The first 77 Kuzbass coal miners walked off the job in Mezhdurechensk on July 10. The following day 12,000 workers from five mines in the area joined them. They drew up a list of demands, including better pay, more vacation, higher pensions. Their overriding complaint: despite Gorbachev's calls for greater local autonomy in managing the economy, bureaucrats in Moscow continued to wield arbitrary control over the mines and were holding back the bulk of their profits. Many local officials openly sympathized with the strikers. "Why not? They breathe the same...
...matter how pleased Gorbachev may be to see a political awakening among the indifferent Soviet citizens, he must recognize that some of their economic demands are potentially threatening. In addition to their attacks on the bureaucracy, the strikers are demanding better food and housing and more consumer goods. The government has responded by flying in tons of supplies as a palliative, setting a costly and hazardous precedent. Most of the Soviet population eats poorly and lives in inferior housing. If workers everywhere rise up and demand more and better, the system's stability could be endangered...
...government (out of a total of 9,300 overall) on half pay. Even when they are at full salary, these men and women make only about $4,000 a year, or approximately one-third the average salary earned by government teachers inside Israel. West Bank professors fare much better. Despite the fact that higher education has been closed down since early 1988, they still receive full paychecks, thanks mostly to oil-rich Arab countries and international organizations that have donated millions of dollars for the purpose...