Word: picketers
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...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...
Soon after midnight, picket lines began forming at GM plants from California to New Jersey. "Grab a sign and get in line," shouted union organizers at workers as they poured out of the GM factory in Pontiac, Mich. The signs read: U.A.W. ON STRIKE FOR JOB SECURITY and ONE DAY HEADLINES, THE NEXT DAY BREADLINES. At a Chevrolet plant in Van Nuys, Calif., most of the 4,045 U.A.W. members walked off the job, and the facility shut down. The company was forced to cancel two Saturday shifts at its Buick assembly plant in Flint, Mich...
Other workers, especially younger ones who have only recently returned from layoffs or who had large house payments to meet, were less anxious to walk the picket line. U.A.W. members could get just $85 a week in strike benefits and are ineligible for government unemployment payments. The average weekly salary for union members is now $506.80, and they can often earn much more with overtime. Al Manzie, 33, is a grinder at Chevrolet's gear-and-axle plant in Detroit. He has not had a raise in two years and has been laid off four times in the past...