Word: worked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Rock Island railroadmen complained about their corncob-filled caboose mattresses half a century ago, they unknowingly baptized a working practice that is as old as man's labor and as fresh as this week's news. Chided the trainmaster: "What do you want-featherbeds?" Since then, featherbedding-the purposeful slowing down or spreading out of work to make jobs-has become one of the most emotion-packed points of dispute between...
...industries ranging from trucking to show business, printing to airlines. This year, as part of industry's tougher stand toward labor, management aims to pluck some of the featherbeds. A chief cause of the current steel strike is management's insistence on winning more control over local working practices, partly motivated by the desire to wipe out what Chief Steel Negotiator R. Conrad Cooper called "loafing, featherbedding and unjustifiable idle time." The railroad industry, worst feathered of the lot, has pledged an all-out assault against make-work when contract talks open this fall. In the oil industry...
...steel industry actually has managed to eliminate featherbedding more than many industries, and management, when pressed for examples of make-work, can only complain that a ten-man hearth crew does the work of seven men, that in one plant five crews are employed to move steel where four could do the job. Featherbedding has helped to break whole firms: automakers now contend that it was a major factor behind the demise of Packard, Hudson and Kaiser cars. The United Auto Workers often insist that several types of skilled workers-machinists, oilers, carpenters, metal handlers-work on a single...
Instead of blindly disputing each other on the highly charged subject of featherbedding, both management and labor need to realize their duty to themselves-and to the U.S.-to work together in eliminating a luxury that the U.S. cannot afford in a competitive world economy. Featherbedding pushes up prices, pinches productivity, penalizes the consumer and the productive worker to reward the drone. Worst of all, by discouraging the use of time-saving and production-boosting new machines, it retards U.S. economic growth. Every economist agrees that the best way to create more jobs is to make the economy grow faster...
...time for dormitory bridge. One evening David Hackney, 14, of Daytona Beach, after bidding seven spades, laid down his 13 spades. The ensuing uproar was capped when Edward Root, 16, of St. Petersburg, jotted a formula on the blackboard, ran some figures through a table computer, did some paper work and announced that a bridge player could expect such a hand once in 635,013,559,600 deals...