Labor Quiz: What's a Nixie?
Monday, May 14, 2012
(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)Back when most mail moved by train, the Postal Service’s railway mail clerks
hand-sorted at least 600 pieces of mail per hour in drafty, noisy boxcars
hurtling down the tracks, and often spoke in shorthand. A “nixie” was: a
damaged or empty mail sack, an unsortable or misaddressed letter, or the hook
used to snag the sacks held aloft at the cranes standing outside train
stations. Click here
to submit your answer and you could be next week’s winner!
Last Week’s Quiz: The organization that Jerry Wurf
and a couple of other union leaders tried to establish in the late 1970's was
the Progressive Alliance, a collective effort by the “dissident” wing of the
U.S. labor leadership to establish an alternative labor politics to that of the
AFL-CIO. Congrats to Carl Goldman of AFSCME Council 26, Washington, DC, this
week’s quiz winner!