Word: thatchers
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Sound, fury and rotting fruit signify trouble for Thatcher...
...ended the most disruptive labor crisis since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. The ten-day strike not only shut down freight operations at more than 90 ports but badly crimped the island nation's maritime exports, worth an estimated $2.5 billion a week. There was also a political cost: the strike by longshoremen, called dockers by the British, came to symbolize a summer of discontent for the 58-year-old Prime Minister. Faced with an often violent, five-month-old coal miners' strike, economic setbacks and a series of political pratfalls, Thatcher seems surrounded by trouble...
...unions remain Thatcher's greatest affliction. The dock strike began after a nonunion worker was employed to move iron ore off the docks at Immingham, in eastern England. Though the procedure was routine, the Transport and General Workers' Union called a walkout. Union leaders pressed port employers to agree that nonunion help would never be used again, but the demand was rejected. Many dockers also suspected that the Thatcher government intended to seek a change in a 1947 law that effectively guarantees them jobs for life. The Prime Minister insisted that that was not the case...
...Thatcher received another piece of bad news last week when a High Court judge overturned a government-imposed ban on unions at the government's top-secret listening post at Cheltenham. The Prime Minister ousted the unions last January, claiming that two earlier work stoppages had badly disrupted the round-the-clock monitoring of satellite, radio and other communications. Though the judge upheld the government's right to forbid unions at Cheltenham, he ruled that the Prime Minister should have first consulted labor leaders and the Cheltenham staff. The decision, which the government is appealing, fanned opposition-party...
Annoying though this was for Thatcher, it hardly equaled the frustration of the miners' strike. For 20 weeks, Arthur Scargill, the militant president of the National Union of Mineworkers, has led a violence-scarred crusade against the government's plan to close 20 of the country's 200 pits and cut 20,000 workers from the industry payroll of 180,000. The strike has cost an estimated $2.6 billion in lost production and has contributed to the decline of the British pound (at one point this month, its value in U.S. dollars sank to an alltime...