0 a man who is employed to do unskilled physical work, usually building or making roads -- （通常指建筑或道路工程中的）苦工，干粗活的工人
For it does not matter if the promotion under consideration is to being foreman of a gang of navvies or to managing director of a large corporation.
Not surprisingly, therefore, given their unruly reputation, newspapers and periodicals were quick to seize upon examples of navvy loyalty wherever and whenever they occurred.
There is, moreover, little or no visual communication among them; even the navvies are apparently separate from one another while being engaged in the same task.
It may be noted that the railways were more pervasive than the canals, the construction of which had also of course involved large numbers of navvies.
Is it not a fact that the very hard work is done by mechanical navvies instead of ordinary labour?
However, most contemporary accounts of navvies tended to stigmatize them as an insubordinate, unruly, and ungovernable class of men.
Yet when you put the unskilled men to do the navvy's work you displace the skilled navvy.
Evidently the fact that navvies tended to move around the country in all-male bands was one of the major causes of concern.
