Word: costes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...without making even a minimum money offer for the workers to think about. The steelworkers had offered to settle for the same terms they won in 1956 after a 36-day strike: a three-year contract with a yearly raise of about 15? an hour, plus a cost-of-living escalator clause. Management's counteroffer: either 1) a one-year extension of the present contract with no wage boost and abolition of the present escalator clause that ties wages to the cost-of-living index, or 2) improved pension and insurance benefits, plus a "modest" wage increase next year...
...transformed the corporation from a sprawling holding company with dozens of subsidiary corporations into an integrated corporate unit, spun off businesses, e.g., shipping, that did not fit into the company's basic pattern. To get Big Steel on a lean, efficient basis, he vigorously pushed a standard-cost system for evaluating every job in the company. He increased the company's incentive system until it now covers 75% of all employees. (Blough, whose salary is $265,000 a year, also picked up $L,985,623 worth of Big Steel stock through options...
France has one of the best and most buoyant steel positions in its history, raised production to a record 16.2 million tons last year. The industry is modern, research conscious and anxious to win new markets. Though Japan is still considered a high-cost producer of iron and steel-mainly because it has to import raw materials-it also manages to compete actively abroad, is moving into South America at the expense of the U.S. industry. Japan's steel industry is dominated by six big firms led by Yawata Iron & Steel, under President Arakazu Ojima, who wants the industry...
Employment costs among foreign steel producers give them a valuable leverage in competing on world markets with the U.S. Compared with U.S. steel wage costs (including fringe benefits) of $3.22 an hour in 1957 (the latest year for which foreign comparisons are available), the Japanese steelworker cost his employer 46? an hour, the French worker 96?, the Italian worker 81?, the British worker 90?, the West German worker $1.01. Once, the U.S. could have made up the difference through its technical superiority, but that advantage is being rapidly whittled away by technical advances abroad...
Despite its swift progress, the industry is on the verge of new breakthroughs in steel manufacturing and processing that could mean substantial cost cuts. The most important development in steel in decades is the basic oxygen process, developed in Austria seven years ago, in which a jet of pure oxygen is blown into molten steel held in a special converter. The oxygen accelerates the refining action of the metal, burns out impurities, uses less scrap metal. An oxygen vessel costs only about one-half of open-hearth facilities, turns out steel ingots in 35 minutes, v. ten to twelve hours...