Word: automan
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...equipment: her breasts encased solar batteries. Lee Majors as The Six Million Dollar Man was simply state-of-the-art beefcake. Now an ABC show of stupefying banality called Auto-man offers a fluorescent, blond Superman who is summoned up by a wimpish computer jock in moments of crisis. Automan owes more to I Dream of Jeannie than to computer science, however. Another new show, NBC's Riptide, has something for every armchair technocrat, including a klutzy orange robot with a display screen in its chest and a silly grin on its mute face...
...they are unsure how much they can do in terms of meeting the Administration's goals. After two years of slumping sales, they have already cut their payrolls deeply, and what few dollars they can spare are being plowed back into programs to build smaller cars. Says one automan: "I'm in favor of this in principle, but I think Lewis is being a little naive." The U.A.W., which is already under pressure from GM and Ford to agree to the kind of wage and benefit concessions that Chrysler workers accepted, is prepared to negotiate some sacrifices...
...with their membership is waning - an ominous portent for next year's heavy calendar of union bargaining. The VW strike is also unsettling other foreign firms that are thinking of starting plants in the U.S., notably Japan's automaking Toyota, Nissan (Datsun) and Honda. Says one Japanese automan: "If U.S. workers ask to get even with General Motors and Ford right away, I'm afraid no company will come here...
Built by Hitler to turn out "people's cars," the Volkswagen factory made only 210 cars before it went into war production, and after V-E day it was a shambles, 60% destroyed by Allied bombs. Nordhoff, too, was part of the postwar wreckage-a lifelong German automan who, because he had manufactured trucks for the Wehrmacht, was forbidden to work in the U.S. zone at anything except manual labor...
...Boom Slayer. Roche may have a touch of the typical automan's optimism, but other seasoned economy watchers agree that business is basically sound. "A recession is certainly not imminent," says Harvard Economist John V. Lintner. "Business is very strong." Echoes James Robertson, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board: "Too much is being made of the auto figures and the market performance. When matched with other straws in the wind, neither of these developments means much." Even so, Gardner Ackley, the President's chief economist, says: "Some of the tremendous exuberance has gone out of the economy...