Word: costly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many businesses resist raising wages, fearing that the higher cost will put them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis their competitors. But the minimum wage may be moving up. Congress is debating a bill that would increase the minimum 30 cents to 40 cents an hour each year for the next three years, bringing the rate to $4.55 by 1991. Supporters of the legislation contend that workers need the boost to keep up with rising prices, since the minimum wage has lost 22% of its purchasing power since the last increase in 1981. Opponents, including business lobbyists, believe the hike...
Some firms look even farther afield and try to recruit workers outside their region. But often the chief obstacle to attracting new employees is the high cost of housing, so some potential employers have tried to compensate. An auto-parts division of Textron based in Dover, N.H., gives some of its new white-collar employees short-term "bridge" loans for housing at below-market interest rates. Last year the state's average home price was $136,000, nearly 60% higher than the U.S. median...
...dozen years has the Pentagon been able to close a major military base, even though some of the installations it operates -- at a cost of billions to the taxpayers -- were built to help fend off marauding Indians or troublemaking Redcoats. The reason? Not Pentagon profligacy, for once, but political pork...
...owner, Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. After the accident, Occidental promptly shut down the pipeline that services Piper Alpha and five other platforms, thereby temporarily cutting British North Sea oil production by 12.9%. The losses in export earnings and tax revenues from Piper Alpha alone were expected to cost the British government at least $1.2 billion a year, while the losses to insurance companies were likely to exceed $1 billion. Occidental Chairman Armand Hammer promised a contribution of $1.7 million to a Piper Alpha disaster fund and an indemnity of some $170,000 to the family of each victim...
...Cost considerations, rather than strategic ones, are the main reason Dukakis opposes most new nuclear weapons, including mobile missiles. The argument for them is compelling: they would be far less vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike. But when his Cambridge experts delve into such things as "aim points" and "kill ratios" in discussing nuclear strategies, Dukakis has a worrisome tendency to wave away such talk as "abstract theology" about how many warheads can dance on the head of a pin. "Some of the arcane scenarios that we nuclear strategists see, he doesn't believe are reasonable," says his top foreign...