Word: dock
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...cruising off the west coast of Scotland, was a declaration of a national state of emergency. It was the fourth such declaration that Britain's Tory government has had to seek since coming to power two years ago. The cause this time: a nationwide strike by 42,000 dock workers, who were again proving that the nation that once ruled the waves is lucky nowadays if it can use its own ports...
...demonstrators' heroes-five dock workers who had been briefly jailed for illegal picketing practices -were the focus of what suddenly exploded last week into the most sullen and emotional confrontations between British labor and British government since Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath came to power two years ago. By midweek, when the Pentonville Five were released on a convenient legal technicality, upwards of 170,000 British workers had left their jobs in sympathy strikes that slowed or shut down mines and steel mills, virtually closed London's Heathrow airport, stopped most of London's busses...
None are more convinced of that than Britain's 42,000 dock workers, who have won a deserved reputation for toughness and truculence. In 1970 they greeted Heath's upset election with demands for an 80% basic wage increase -and shut the ports down for three costly weeks when the Tories refused to ante up. This time the dockers, hard pressed by the introduction of containerized cargo and other improvements, were fighting for jobs...
Last week's showdown grew out of a seemingly minor dispute: the picketing of an East London cold-storage firm by a group of determined dockers. Their demand was that the task of packing shipping containers at the firm should be turned over to registered dock workers. The trouble began when the dockers, defying a "truce" ordered by the new labor court, began to boycott trucks supplying the firm. When the court decided to flex its muscles and send five of the offending dockers to Pentonville, labor decided to flex...
...through the commercial goo oozed out by company calendars or your local chamber of commerce. The DeCordova's view is new and refreshing. You will look in vain for the Vermont covered bridge, the red barns, weathered clabbard and punctuating steeple, the gulls on the wing and boats at dock (probably Rockport). You will even have to search for the Maine lobsterman, the Vermont farmer and Cape Cod fisherman. There is a larger cross-section of class, creed, and color represented here...