Word: strike
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Said Ted Hudson of Stepney: "My wife says we are all the same, a lot of sheep. I wouldn't say she were wrong, mind, but we've got to stick together." Ted was trying to explain why he and 15,000 other London dockworkers were on strike. They had refused to work two Canadian ships, the Beaverbrae and the Argomont, involved in a Communist-led Seamen's Union dispute in Canada. British Communists said the ships were "black" ("hot" in U.S. labor jargon), and urged the men to boycott them...
Explanation. Last week Prime Minister Attlee, aware of the Communist part in the strike, explained things to the House of Commons. Unloading the ships with troops would mean giving over to the wildcat strike leaders the power to decide what ships would be worked. Said Attlee: "It means that a group of irresponsibles can call a ship 'black' if it comes from a particular country with which a particular clique happens to be on bad terms. It may be France one day; it may be Yugoslavia another...
...dockers, ignoring Attlee's speech and the vote, continued the strike. On Tower Hill, midday crowds gathered in the sun to hear soapbox speakers supporting labor solidarity and the strike. One of them popped out his National Health Service Acts false teeth, held them aloft triumphantly, cried gummily: "I'd never have had a tooth in me head if your fathers and my fathers hadn't stuck tergeth-er in the past for their rights. Solidarity, that's wot did it, and it'll do it again...
...Editor & Publisher, a secondhand dealer last week advertised: "GOING FAST! Machinery, Equipment & Supplies of the Philadelphia Record . . ." It was in February 1947, during a Newspaper Guild strike, that Publisher J. David Stern abruptly sold his Record, two Camden (N.J.) newspapers and a radio station for $12 million to the rival Philadelphia Bulletin. Pot-bellied Publisher Stern retired to a Manhattan penthouse to chain-smoke Optimo Dunbar cigars and dictate his memoirs. But son David III ("Tommy"), now 39, itched to get back in the business, ranged far & wide seeking a good buy. He found it in New Orleans...
Died. Alexander Fell Whitney, 76, militant $17,500-a-year president (since 1928) of the 216,000-strong Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen; of a heart attack; in Bay Village, Ohio. Whitney once vowed to unseat President Truman after the unsuccessful 1946 rail strike ("You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and you can't make a President out of a ribbon salesman"). He later backtracked and gave Truman all-out support. Said the President in his message of condolence: "[He] became . . . the exemplar of the philosopher's teaching that...