Word: switchmen
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...system of regulations that South Africans call "petty apartheid" is slowly flaking away. Park benches are now integrated in most cities, and elevator apartheid has almost disappeared; interracial sports are permitted on a limited basis. Blacks are moving into jobs formerly reserved for whites (computer technicians, bank tellers, railroad switchmen), but equal pay for equal work is still a rarity. The average white salary remains twelve times the average black one, and the government spends 17 times as much to educate a white child as a black one. The government has made a few business concessions to coloreds and Asians...
...graduates were women-and they want to put their degrees to work. Now that civil rights laws bar discrimination by sex, more and more women are demanding relatively high-pay, blue-collar jobs. Federal courts have ruled against companies that refused to hire women as railway agents and telephone switchmen. In the courts, women are now challenging a variety of work rules, including company policies against assigning women to premium-pay night work. Certainly discrimination exists, especially in the higher ranks. The percentage of women in architecture, college teaching and some other professions has dropped significantly since World...
...business and industry account for about 7,500 of the 44,000 complaints filed so far with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Restrictions as to hours were swept away, airline stewardesses won the right to work after age 32, and women got jobs as jockeys, steamship yeomen and telephone switchmen, which were formerly denied them. Soon we may expect legions of female firemen, airline pilots, sanitation men and front-line soldiers (although Anthropologist Margaret Mead thinks that they would be too fierce...
Actually, a big step was taken last November under an arbitration award by a panel created by the Congress. It granted carriers the right to eliminate gradually 90% of the firemen on diesels, along with unneeded trainmen, including some brakemen and switchmen. This reduction of up to 40,000 employees would save the carriers about $325 million a year. The unions have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court...
...Switchmen's Union of North America (18,000). Boss of the Switchmen's Union, founded in 1906, is Neil P. Speirs, 50, a business administration major at the University of Idaho who left a white-collar job to become a switchman during the Great Depression because the pay was better. Switchmen are essentially brakemen who work in railyards rather than on the road, taking over from road crews as the trains pull into the yards. In recent decades, automatic switching controls have taken over much of the switchmen's former work, so that, like firemen and brakemen...