Word: blough
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Despite all fears about lower operating rates, few steelmen had poor business to report. National Steel, Armco Steel and Bethlehem Steel all had good sales and earnings, Bethlehem with its best earnings ever (see PERSONNEL). And for U.S. Steel, Chairman Roger M. Blough noted nine-month earnings of $329 million for a 9.7% return on sales v. $243.3 million and an 8% return in 1956. All told this year, said Blough, the industry will produce 115 million tons, just under the 1956 level. Next year, though the industry may slip back to an operating rate somewhere between...
Unmistakably agreeing with Anderson and Martin, the American Bankers Association, meeting in Atlantic City, voted a resolution calling upon the Government to keep up its fight against, inflation. In a speech to the bankers, U.S. Steel Corp.'s Board Chairman Roger M. Blough urged a two-point anti-inflation program to supplement Government policies: 1) efforts by management and labor to increase productivity, and 2) restraint by both to keep wage rises from outpacing productivity. In effect, Blough was restating Dwight Eisenhower's theme: in a free economy, the Government cannot defeat inflation without help from business...
From this Blough concluded: "No one company, no one industry, no one union can alone stop the march of inflation. Neither the steel industry or any other industry ever sets the wage pattern in America, for the postwar wage pattern has been a never-ending spiral in which each industry, in its turn, is called on to pay a little more than the preceding industry did, and the next industry must then pay a little more than that...
...first industry witness in a Senate investigation to see whether price boosting by business or wage increases for labor is primarily responsible for inflation, Blough stoutly denied that the $6-a-ton average price increase ordered by U.S. Steel last month (TIME, July 8) was inflationary. As far as U.S. Steel was concerned, said Blough, the increase represented only a 4% rise in selling prices, and was not enough to offset wage and other cost increases amounting to about 6½%. For a family spending $5,000 a year, he said, the rise will bring an increase in the cost...
...price of steel, and the price of steel products, Steelman Blough continued, have often moved in opposite directions. From 1951 to 1955 the price of steel rose 14%, while household appliances dropped 13%. When U.S. Steel in May 1948 tried to fight inflation by refusing a wage increase and instead cut steel prices by $1.25 a ton, the cost-of-living index spurted two percentage points during the following three months. After three months U.S. Steel realized "we might as well have tried to stop an express train with a peashooter. So we had to rescind our price action, increase...