Word: wages
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ignoring the plea of their chief, delegates to the convention of the Transport and General Workers' Union last week voted for a motion that effectively scuttled the landmark agreement on wage restraint between Britain's unions and the Labor government of Prime Minister James Callaghan. The vote to demand substantial wage increases was a deep personal humiliation for Jones, who in 1973 had helped draw up the agreement. In a weary voice, he declared that the TGWU action would lead to "a wage scramble, renewed inflation, increased unemployment and new trouble for the pound...
...Confidence Vote. It could also lead to the fall of the Labor government. The agreement on voluntary wage restraints, grandly dubbed the "social contract," had constituted the Callaghan government's most compelling argument for remaining in office. If the Labor Party is unable to control or moderate the unions' wage demands, thus further aggravating inflation (now running at 17% annually), Callaghan could face a no-confidence vote in the House of Commons that he would probably lose. The resulting election might be a Tory landslide. Already David Steel has threatened to withdraw his pledge to support the Callaghan...
...prognosis is grim for new talks on restraints. Until now the TGWU's adherence to the contract had discouraged other unions from breaking the wage-restraint agreement. With 1.9 million members, the TGWU is the largest single union within the umbrella-like Trades Union Congress, which ostensibly represents organized labor in Britain. Now other major unions are demanding release from the agreement. At the mine workers' union convention in Tynemouth last week, delegates representing 262,000 members voted to demand raises by Nov. 1. The 1.3 million-member engineers' union has also voted against further wage restraints...
...Grunwick siege painfully dramatizes the Labor government's precarious dependence on the trade unions, whose unpopularity among nonunionists is rapidly rising. Against the backdrop of the large-scale workers' revolt against wage freezes, the Grunwick strike reinforces the public impression that trade unions are uncontrollable...
...years as an "era." Luscomb and DuPont had shared the days when advocating reform often meant speaking from soapboxes to mangy dogs and small boys on universal suffrage, civil rights for Americans of every race and color, and the claim each man or woman had to earning a decent wage...