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Cliffside Lift Operators Warned to Return to Work
 SHARN—Grayflood chief stevedore Blau Koonrick warned lift and crane operators in the Cliffside ward to return to their posts immediately in a statement he termed a “final warning.”
“If you don’t get back to work tomorrow, you’ll learn a painful lesson about your own selfishness,” Koonrick said on Sar afternoon. “We will not have Sharn’s sea commerce held captive by agitators who aren’t satisfied with an honest wage for hard work.”
Koonrick’s comments follow a march and demonstration on Far by hundreds of lift and crane operators through the Grayflood and northern Ship’s Towers districts.
The operators are demanding higher wages from their employers. Many of the lift operators are city workers, while the operators of the massive cranes are employed by a cartel of stevedore companies with links to Houses Orien and Lyrandar.
Lower Dura councilor Ilyra Boromar said he’d hear grievances from the lift operators but said returning to work was a necessary precondition for talks. Koonrick struck a more strident tone, saying the stevedore cartels would take “whatever actions are necessary” to get the cranes running again.
“Let’s not kid ourselves: People are going to start going hungry in Sharn because these fools won’t unload ships full of food,” he said. “With their greed and selfishness, the crane operators are going to turn the whole city against them.”
The crane and lift operators vowed another march tomorrow and said lift operators across the city will walk off the job in solidarity.
“What kind of ham-handed threat is this?” said crane operator Breen Wallak. “The city is behind us—we’ve been under the thumb of the profiteers for too long.”
The cheering crowds during Far’s march are proof that “the ordinary working citizen of Sharn stands behind us,” he said.
While Grayflood’s cranes have remained still for two days, ships are still being loaded and unloaded in southern Ship’s Towers. Most of House Lyrandar’s elemental galleons have been docking there for the last month, a shift one Lyrandar captain said was unrelated to the current dispute.
About the Author
David Noonan is a designer/developer for Wizards of the Coast. Before coming to Wizards, he was a daily newspaper reporter in Washington state. Apparently the city hall beat is good practice for an Eberron campaign.
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