Word: seamens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...strike threat as a Sunday punch against rising prices. Shipboard conditions for the N.M.U.'s 1,100 lakemen could hardly explain the haste. And the pay ranging from $150 a month for freighter deckhands to $310 for chief stewards on tankers, is good, considering the fact that seamen get meals and bunk. What Joe Curran was really engaged in was an all-out membership drive...
...seamen hailed this as a victory, with reason. As the ships sailed again, the crews were on an eight-hour instead of a 12-hour day, which had been one of the chief bones of contention...
...crisis had come. For a month the vital arteries of Great Lakes shipping had been blocked by the strike of the Canadian Seamen's Union. The embolism, choking off coal shipments from the U.S. to Canada, now threatened to cripple Canadian industry. Last week the Canadian Government announced seizure of the strikebound shipping companies. It was the second seizure since war's end, one of the few in Canadian history...
Three days later the Government, through Shipping Controller Captain E. S. Brand of the Royal Canadian Navy, began to operate 100-odd ships belonging to 29 companies. The Upper Lakes and St. Lawrence Navigation Co., which signed with the Seamen's union, will still sail its own ships. The Government was operating only freighters, leaving the passenger lines, which normally do a big business with U.S. tourists, at the docks. While Captain Brand runs his ships a Government-appointed Commissioner will mediate the dispute itself...
...Curran, who had never really wanted a strike, was soon satisfied after Government spokesmen pushed a stack of chips to the middle of the table. The chips: for all seamen, a $17.50 flat monthly increase and overtime at $1 an hour. With normal overtime, now to begin after 48 hours instead of 56, this would give an AB (now making $145 a month) close to $200-what he earned in wartime. This was good enough for Curran's seagoing National Maritime Union...