Word: labors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years as mayor, Daley faced strikes aplenty; yet he had a knack of finessing and postponing problems until, sooner or later, they went away. Combative Jane Byrne, however, makes the mistake of attacking labor unions and other groups rather than hunkering down with them in search of a compromise...
Daley is at least partly to blame for the crisis. He had a habit of agreeing to generous labor settlements for teachers without knowing how he was going to pay for them. To some extent, he mortgaged the future of the schools to buy short-term labor peace. But he also had the muscle to keep the city going by prying additional aid out of the state legislature. Byrne will have to relearn some of Daley's lessons if the city that works is going to start working again...
...productivity, which had risen an average 3% a year in the 1960s, declined by more than 1%. There were other reasons for this deterioration in production per hour worked. Among them: the heavy burden of Government regulations, the entry of so many untrained first-time workers into the labor force, and the decline of research and development, in part because managers have concluded that inflation makes the payoff too distant, too uncertain. Turgid productivity, which aggravated inflation and contributed to the debauch of the dollar in world markets, is as serious as any problem that the nation faces...
...ensuing judgment, not surprisingly, is unfavorable. During the winter of 1973-74, with the English unions and the Conservative government locked in strikes and threats, Strickland becomes active in Labor Party politics, on the side all his well-to-do friends detest. He thinks he is rekindling the socialist torch he carried when young, but his wife Clare scalds him: "You're addicted to your own self-importance and like a real junkie you need bigger and bigger doses to keep going." Strickland also becomes embroiled in an affair with an enormously rich young woman and realizes, belatedly, that...
...about; for oil, he would have to pay about $1,100 for the winter (150 gal. of No. 2 oil are about equal in heating power to a cord of dry hardwood). So the amateur woodcutter has about $1,000 to pay himself for two months of intermittent hard labor, and six months of the wood lugging, floor sweeping, ash hauling and stovepipe reaming that are attendant on wood fires...