Word: shipyards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, friend of congressional committee chairmen, was accustomed to getting his way with defense contractors. Once, according to congressional investigators, while visiting General Dynamics' Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Conn., the crusty admiral admired a horn-handled fruit knife and idly declared that he would like to have a dozen of them. Shipyard executives hopped to. The handle was shipped off to a General Dynamics' lab, where analysis revealed that it had been made from the horn of a rare Southeast Asian buffalo. More buffalo horn was sent for, and a dozen...
...have to declare bankruptcy and then reorganize to avoid some of the damage payments. In 1982 Manville took that controversial route when it was in danger of being overwhelmed by lawsuits related to its manufacture of asbestos. Most of the problems began in World War II, when thousands of shipyard workers were exposed to asbestos. They later developed serious lung diseases and cancer. Manville is now operating under the protection of the bankruptcy laws, and its profits are insulated from legal claims while it tries to negotiate settlements of the suits. Union Carbide has strongly denied that it is even...
Lech Walesa was back in the spotlight last week, holding aloft a bouquet of flowers and basking in the cheers of 1,500 supporters gathered near the Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk. Four years ago, the outspoken electrician had scaled the shipyard gates and assumed the leadership of a strike that gave birth to Solidarity, the Communist bloc's first independent trade union. Solidarity was officially suspended in 1981, when the regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law and detained most of the union's leaders. But as Walesa and his fellow workers showed...
With contemporary society beset with ever-increasing obstacles, though, things aren't always quite so formulaic. What happens, for instance, when something fails to go according to plan at the shipyard, and someone questions the sense of the entire system? Worse yet, if the rebel is a member of one's own family? How strongly do unions and brothers bond...
Walesa's act of defiance could cost him his job repairing battery-powered vehicles, a post he was given in April following his release from eleven months' detention. Officials at the Gdansk shipyard went to considerable lengths last week to play down the implications of the former union leader's absence. But when Walesa failed to show up for the third day in a row, making him technically liable for dismissal, shipyard officials suggested they might take disciplinary action...