Word: tarrytown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Compounding Penalties. The case involves a General Motors assembly plant in North Tarrytown, N.Y. For years, the plant dumped chemical wastes -spray-paint residues, metals, caustic cleaning agents-directly into the Hudson River. In 1963 the company was ordered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a treatment facility tying into a regional sewerage system. Various planning problems delayed groundbreaking until late last year. Meanwhile, the plant kept pouring its effluents into the river...
Many North Tarrytown residents hardly cared: the plant yields about $500,000 in local taxes each year. But Hudson River fishermen and conservationists were angry. So was Burns, who by then had sharpened his major weapon: the long-neglected Refuse Act of 1899, which forbids putting raw wastes into navigable waterways without a permit. Where polluters in the past had been fined up to $2,500 for general violations. Burns discovered that he could legally consider "every time someone opened a valve and discharged wastes into a river as a separate act of pollution." By compounding the penalties...
...company-which spent $59 million last year to fight pollution in its U.S. plants-accepted a consent decree from a U.S. district court. It agreed to stop pouring noxious wastes into the Hudson until its treatment facility starts operating later this year. Meantime, the Tarrytown plant will pump those effluents into railroad tank cars, then haul them to another treatment center...
...time even to go to the toilet. The image of Charlie Chaplin, in Modern Times, leaving a plant and turning and twisting an invisible wrench all the way home is less funny than ever. "Do you know what I do?" asks a striker outside G.M.'s assembly plant at Tarrytown, N.Y. "I fix seven bolts. Seven bolts! Day in and day out, the same seven bolts. What do I think about? Raquel Welch...
...modern terms, a house in the suburbs and two cars in the breezeway. Yet he is no longer willing to pay the traditional price of increased productivity?or, perhaps more accurately, unable to endure any more speedups. His contradictory yearnings were expressed by one striking G.M. worker in Tarrytown: "What I hope is, by the time my kids grow up, this plant will be automated. They'll sit here in business suits, looking at a panel of instruments, and they will be called technicians or technologists and get twice as much as I do for half the work...