The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.29           September 1, 1997 
 
 
The Great Society  

BY HARRY RING
The system that works - "The UK has become `massively' more unequal than it was 20 years ago, with the income of the richest tenth of the population equal to that of the entire bottom half... One in five people live in poverty." - The Independent, London.

They're on the case - Anthony Blair, Britain's new Labour prime minister, has given members of Parliament a three-month summer holiday, two weeks longer than previously.

Read-it-and-retch dep't -With many Spanish-speaking customers, Allied Insurance in Amarillo, Texas, hired Rosa Gonzales and Ester Hernández, both of whom are bilingual. Then they fired them for speaking Spanish to each other. Co- owner Linda Polk said they were "very rude for speaking a language we don't understand." They were hired, she declared, "to speak Spanish to non-American-speaking people," not to each other.

It figures - Addison, a Chicago suburb, settled a bias claim by Latino families targeted for urban removal to make way for a condo and town house development. Those being pushed out will receive up to $7,000 each, for a total of $1.8 million. Their lawyers will receive $2.5 million.

`Racist? Us?' - "I don't think it's a racial issue; it's a cultural issue. We have our well-established Hispanics that have lived here for years that are the average American type. And then, there is the immigrant group that has much closer ties to Hispanic culture." - The mayor of Addison.

One of them safety nuts - The Labor Department ruled that Steven Jones had been illegally terminated as safety manager at the Army's Utah incinerator for burning obsolete, deadly chemical weapons. Jones was bounced for refusing to certify that 3,016 hazards at the incinerator were an "acceptable" risk.

Can drive you crazy - With the employment rate up, there were fewer applicants for jobs at next month's Puyallup state fair in western Washington. Bleated Richard Johnson, a state jobs director: "This is awful... Last year they were wrapped around the building and half way down the block... People already have jobs this year. That's a scary thing for us."

Gotcha - British regulations stipulate that truck drivers can't be made to work more than 10 hours in a 24- hour period. But, the Dept. of Transportation admits, a loophole makes it possible to require workers to put in 20- hour stretches - ten at the end of one 24-hour period, plus 10 more at the start of the next.  
 
 
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