Word: gli
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Back home in Italy they are dubbed Gli Insabbiati - literally, "buried in the sand." Abroad, some 25,000 expatriate engineers, surveyors, carpenters, me chanics and truck drivers have helped make Italy a major force in the rich, ruggedly competitive field of interna tional construction. The Gli Insabbiati started with projects in the deserts of North Africa - hence their nickname -but now they are spreading around the world. More and more, they resemble the Caesars' legions, who two millennia ago built highways, aqueducts and cities from Scotland to Syria...
Lately, prosperity has begun to trim profit margins. Wages for the Gli Insabbiati are gradually rising; an Italian engineer abroad earns about $10,000 yearly in wages and fringes, a truck driver about $5,000. Moving beyond Africa also means higher costs for employers. Not the least of the problems is that the contractors stand to lose many of the hard-working desert veterans, who have a habit of settling where the job takes them. Cogefar, another Milan company, is about to begin a $56 million tunnel-boring job for a hydroelectric plant on New Zealand's Tongariro River...