Word: subway
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...York City's transportation system is a precarious mechanism. All that is needed to get it out of kilter is for somebody to stop when he should go, or go when he should stop. At cold dawn one day last week, 500 subway motormen (of 3,167 total) decided to stop, walked off their jobs. Within minutes the city's 237-mile subway system was disrupted, its 4,700,000 riders were disoriented. Within two hours the city found itself locked in the biggest, messiest transportation scramble it had ever seen. Commuters flooded to the streets, turning...
...cause of the strike lay deep in the troubled heart of modern unionism, where skilled laborers and craftsmen are fighting for their due in a world of monolithic industrial unionism. The Motormen's Benevolent Association, made up of 80% of the subway motormen, had been fighting the domination of the city's transit system by a powerful professional Irishman, Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill, and the determination of the mayor's Transit Authority to deal only with politically powerful T.W.U. Last year, when the motormen challenged Quill in a fight, a state supreme court enjoined M.B.A...
...losses in sales. Newspapers lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in pages of retail advertising. Macy's talked to Gimbels. Macy's President Jack Straus and Gimbels' President Bernard Gimbel conferred with Mayor Robert Wagner, posed for pictures as they rode the sometimes operative subway back to their monster department stores to prove that it could be done...
...week's end some discouraged motormen, threatened with dismissal, were shuffling sadly back to work. Subway service was clunking back to normal-and so was the city. Bedeviled Mayor Wagner (a "jellyfish," snorted the New York Herald Tribune), refused to discuss the issue until the M.B.A. canceled its "illegal strike." The motormen could only appeal to Democratic Governor Averell Harriman, who, many suspected, would only appeal to Bob Wagner, who would only appeal...
...week the strike had cost city retailers more than $10 million, the city itself $2,000,000 in sales taxes and $1,000,000 more in subway revenues. There was little doubt that, in spite of the tough talk and threatened firings, the subway motormen had made it pretty clear to the jittery city that they wanted to be alone...