Word: labor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other taxation and monetary measures are taking hold, all credibility in the value of the pound will be undercut; British export costs, swollen by excessive wage gains, will rise, slowing foreign sales of everything from cars and gin to razor blades and woolens. Particularly because his is a Labor government, Wilson's ability to rein in wage demands is almost the litmus test of his ability to set his economy in order...
History matters in Britain's present attitudes toward work. "Workingmen," says London School of Economics Professor Richard Titmuss, "carry with them a folk memory." The memory is of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six Dorsetshire farm laborers who in 1834 were transported to the penal colony at Australia's Botany Bay for attempting to form a trade union. The memory includes the General Strike of 1926, the massive unemployment of the Great Depression, the perennial pain of class distinctions, the furious battles to gain labor's rights. It has left British labor with what Labor Journalist John Cole calls...
Wilson's draconian measures are designed not only to freeze wages and prices but, ironically enough for a Labor government, to create some unemployment. Already the first layoffs from firms cutting back production have begun. The British workingman's reaction is predictable. "It's a shock this comes from a Labor government," says Senior Shop Steward John Recordon of London's Palmer Aero Products. "I can't see any blame for the worker in all this, but now they're going to freeze wages. This talk about workin' harder is a myth...
...resistance to change in work methods by the worker, many an employer is willing to shoulder much of the blame for Britain's plight. "Management is simply not putting enough horsepower at the disposal of its labor force," says Deputy Director General Douglas Taylor of the Confederation of British Industry. Employers have tacitly accepted the rules of the full employment game by hoarding workers that they really do not need against the day they might. Nor is featherbedding unknown in board rooms. In The Suicide of a Nation?, Writer and Critic Goronwy Rees reported attending a regular directors...
...which the students are building. Mai Viet Phuong, 20, organized hog co-operatives among the district's farmers. Standing in red clay soil that squished over his sandals, Luong Van Tron, 20, a law student, recalled how his pals kidded him at first about stooping to such "cheap" labor; now eight of them have joined...