Word: contraction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Finally it was over. After 109 days, two abortive contract offers and untold expenditures of rancor, obstinacy and personal discomfort, rank-and-file members of the United Mine Workers voted late last week to end their strike. With union leaders promising that the 165,000 miners would return to their jobs on Monday and mine owners predicting that coal shipments would be back to normal within the week, the energy crisis that had been threatening-but never quite materializing-in a dozen Eastern Central states seemed to have passed...
...miners began voting on the contract in the hollows and flatlands of coal country on Good Friday morning, few involved in the negotiations-coal operators, union officials and federal mediators-held out more than a fifty-fifty chance of approval. Indeed, as the first returns were announced by militant locals in western Pennsylvania and southern Illinois, it looked as if the miners were about to deal a thumping rejection to the pact, as they had done to a previous contract proposal three weeks earlier. But when most of the ballots were tallied, they showed that the rank and file...
...voted no, national bargaining between the U.M.W. and the 130-member Bituminous Coal Operators' Association might have broken down completely. The coal companies and union locals would have begun negotiating on their own. Disillusioned miners thought that further negotiations at any level would not gain them a better contract, at least not one worth continuing the strike for. "It's kind of like playing poker at this point," said Cecil Roberts, 31, a vice president of the U.M. W.'s District 17 in West Virginia. "It's hard to win three hands...
General Dynamics executives contend that they can fulfill the contract only at a heavy loss because the Navy kept changing its mind about what it wanted...
...company charges that since it signed its first contract in 1971, the Navy has asked for some 35,000 engineering and design revisions, which the company could make only by incurring expenses that chewed into company cash. General Dynamics, under orders from its lawyers, would not specify what changes were involved, and the Navy simply refused to comment. But a General Dynamics official at the Groton yards offers some free-form insight. Says he: "If you design a space to hold three bunks, and then you want four, you got trouble because each bunk has its own air conditioning...