Word: important
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...surprisingly, labor has scored its biggest gains in recent years in work places untroubled by foreign competition. While government employees were virtually non-union in 1946, 37% of the country's 6.6 million public workers are card-carrying members today. "You don't import your government from Hong Kong, do you?" says Daniel Mitchell, a labor expert at UCLA. Among private- sector unions, the Service Employees' International, whose membership includes janitors and hospital orderlies, has grown from 625,000 in 1980 to more than 1 million. While that growth reflects intensive union efforts, organizer Andy Stern also credits the increases...
...people. What were once clear divisions are now tangles of crossed lines: there are 40,000 "Canadians" resident in Hong Kong, many of whose first language is Cantonese. And with people come customs: while new immigrants from Taiwan and Vietnam and India -- some of the so-called Asian Calvinists -- import all-American values of hard work and family closeness and entrepreneurial energy to America, America is sending its values of upward mobility and individualism and melting-pot hopefulness to Taipei and Saigon and Bombay...
This smorgasbord of candidates will confront Russian voters on Dec. 12 in the country's first parliamentary elections without a Czar or communist overlord. It is a landmark the historic import of which is exceeded only by the confusion that surrounds the array of parties elbowing one another for a place at the table. On the same day voters choose their new representatives, they will also pass judgment on a draft constitution that dramatically strengthens the power of the President and opens Boris Yeltsin to the charge that he is less interested in building democracy than in consolidating...
Frank Deford's rakish domestic import, Love and Infamy (Viking; 516 pages; $24), is made in America from mostly Japanese parts. The background is historical (the Empire's plan to attack Pearl Harbor); the plot is driven by fantasy; and the characters, both heroes and villains, are shaped from durable polystereotype. On a Consumer Reports rating chart, the novel would get half a meatball...
...Xiaohua was a cook in a Beijing restaurant. Today he is a business tycoon who wears a diamond-studded Rolex watch and owns two Mercedes-Benz and a red Ferrari. Ten years ago, Chen Xiaohan was a steelworker in a mill near Beijing. Now he manages a state-owned import-export company and drives around in a Cadillac with a mobile phone. Wang Guoqing quit his job at the Bank of China in Xian three years ago and is now a multimillionaire retailer, restaurateur and real estate developer who wears Pierre Cardin suits, Italian shoes and a $2,000 Swiss...