Word: strike
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...PITCHING STINKS. "It's just bad pitches," says White Sox coach Jackie Brown. "A bad pitch is one in the middle of the strike zone," where the ball looks like a watermelon and the bat feels like a magic wand. In '94, entire pitching staffs are lobbing large fruit: the Minnesota Twins and Oakland A's + have earned-run averages near 6.00 -- an excellent mark for figure skaters, a pathetic one for hurlers. Yet the good pitchers are as dominating as ever. And the best, Atlanta's Gregg Maddux, is allowing a miserly 1.34 earned runs per game...
...have worked during the past century had several things in common: the strong imposed them on the weak; allies rather than enemies were the target (as when economic pressure helped the U.S. force the French and British from the Suez in 1956); and, most important, the goal did not strike at the core of a nation's identity -- sanctions designed to compel the release of kidnapped diplomats, for example, do not challenge vital interests. But when the underlying objective is nothing less than regime toppling, even tinhorn dictators have successfully resisted sanctions. Cuba's Castro has survived for 35 years...
Labor unions? They're as lost in today's economy as velociraptors would be in a later-than-Jurassic environment. As the smokestack industries that they once dominated declined, unions have been losing members and influence for decades. Those remaining are too timid even to strike much anymore, and when they do they usually lose. They are toothless dinosaurs on the way to becoming fossils...
Here and there, unions are even winning some battles. A Teamsters strike in April forced major trucking companies to stop using part-time, nonunion drivers. The same month, the Communication Workers of America got Nynex, one of the biggest of the new Baby Bell telephone companies, to reverse plans to lay off 22,000 workers. Under a new contract, Nynex will not lay off anybody over the next four years; it will try instead to induce workers to retire early by offering them six years of extra pension benefits...
Militance as well as membership is on the rise. Repeatedly defeated by ; fierce employer resistance -- especially the practice of firing strikers and hiring permanent, nonunion replacements -- unions had almost abandoned the strike weapon. Fewer than 4 million workdays were lost to strikes and lockouts in 1993, the lowest figure in the 47 years that the government has been keeping those statistics and less than one-fifteenth of the record 60.9 million in 1959. A comparison of the first four months of this year to the same period in 1993 shows that the number of workers on strike tripled...