Word: speedups
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Employees, steeped by long service in their own bureaucratic traditions, are buried in paper work and time-wasting procedures. They have been doing the same thing the same way for so long that they resist efforts toward a speedup. A 1952 analysis showed that 27.5% of the staff were 60 or older and 37.8% were between 50 and 60. Says a veteran staffer: "Nobody ever retires from the ICC. Departure is only by death...
Mercury's orbit is sharply elliptical, and its long axis wheels around the sun. The wheeling motion was too fast to fit astronomical theories, and astronomers tried to account for this speedup in ingenious ways: e.g., the influence of an undiscovered planet between the sun and Mercury. None of their explanations worked. But in 1915, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Then all was -relatively- simple. According to Einstein, a body gains mass as it gains speed. When Mercury is approaching the sun on its elliptical orbit, it speeds up a lot. This makes it slightly more...
...everything was going much like the day before when thousands had marched through the streets in protest, and surprisingly forced Otto Grotewohl's Red government to rescind a work speedup decree. An odd, almost festive air made it even harder to believe that an unheard of thing was happening. Children on bicycles circled in front of the marchers. Even when the first Russians rolled into sight in armored cars and open infantry trucks to back up the nervous and confused People's Police (Volkspolizei or Vopos), the marchers grinned and whistled and jeered. An East German perched shakily...
...copy of an American rig, but it is in short supply . . . Drilling is done according to official rates. In the Second Baku fields, for example, the government ordered that each crew drill 2,100 ft. per month in the Pennsylvanian-type limestone. [Then] a well-trained crew of speedup specialists [was moved in and] with ideal working conditions and new equipment drilled 4,800 ft. in one month. Now every crew in the Second Baku must drill 4,800 ft. per month...
When comrade leaders came to him one day last summer and offered to designate him an Aktivist (the East German equivalent of Russia's speedup Stakhano-vites), Willy calmly replied, "Nein. There are better people here than me." The union leaders were astounded; after all, as an Aktivist, Willy would be entitled to a 10,000-mark bonus every month. They reported Willy's refusal to the Chemical Workers' Union in East Berlin. The union bosses shook their heads in admiration. Willy Knoblauch, they decided, should get even more than Aktivist honors. He should be made...