Word: picketer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week that close partnership came undone. Even as the United Automobile Workers union was celebrating the successful end of contract negotiations with the Ford Motor Co. and the ratification of another agreement with General Motors, its Canadian branch went on strike against GM. Blue-and-white picket signs went up in front of the Windsor transmission plant, just a short drive from GM's Detroit headquarters, as workers shut down all 13 Canadian GM plants...
Scargill spoke passionately for a motion to condemn police, not the strikers, for the violence on the picket lines. The measure passed amid tumult and cheers for the N.U.M. president and hoots of derision for moderate union leaders. Then Kinnock lost another battle, this one over an arcane party rule giving local constituency committees-usually a stronghold of party leftists-the power to decide whether their parliamentary representatives should be allowed to stand for reelection. Kinnock wanted all Labor Party members, not just the tightly held local committees, to have a vote in the process. The conference rejected his proposal...
...United Mine Workers have an even stronger tradition than the Auto-workers of rejecting contracts negotiated by their leaders and hitting the picket line. Five times in the past two decades, workers have gone on strike. In 1977-78 the miners were out for 111 days, and in 1981 the walkout lasted 72 days. But U.M.W. President Trumka this year was determined to break precedent. The coal miner turned lawyer wanted to win better salaries and better job security-without recourse to a strike. When the talks in Washington ended, he claimed to have secured a "totally non-concessionary" agreement...
...fact that two of the most powerful and combative unions have managed to achieve at the bargaining table what they have formerly sought to get by the picket line may be an important precedent for the U.S. labor movement. Says Scott Merlis, a securities analyst for Shearson/ American Express: "The Autoworkers' agreement is a watershed in the sense that we are moving from the British model of confrontation to the Japanese model of cooperation between labor and management." But it still remains to be seen if the rank and file will conform to that new model...
Elements of the story are loosely drawn from experience. In 1963 Kennedy returned from Puerto Rico, where he had been managing editor of the English-language San Juan Star, to write features for the Albany Times-Union. He soon found himself walking a picket line as a member of the striking Newspaper Guild. In The Ink Truck, the real is bent into the surreal. Dingy neighborhoods are weirdly illuminated by arsonists' flames; alleys echo to pagan rites; Old World myths are superimposed on the present. There are elegiac hallucinations of the past and an up-to-date orgy...