Word: indexers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Labor in Washington sits a little-known but influential man: Ewan Clague, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is he, knee-deep in charts and statistics, who figures out how high the cost of living has gone. Last week he reported that his sensitive consumer price index (based on 200-odd household commodities) had advanced sharply (.6%) since Sept. 15 to an alltime high ceiling of 174.8%. (The base figure of 100% is based on living costs in 1939.) It would be considerably higher, he added, if his figures accurately measured rent costs. And, said Statistician Clague, there...
...family budget by buying cheap cabbage instead of costly spinach, the steady rise in living costs meant a steady drop in real earnings. But a million wage earners in the mass-production industries-including some 600,000 United Automobile Workers-have their pay hitched to Clague's index and ride up with it. For them, Clague's figures meant a 3?-an-hour pay raise which would cost employers $17 million. Thus the Government, by noting the actuality of inflation, automatically increased it ("built-in inflation," economists call...
...promptly raised its prices 5½%. A fifth round in steel, however, should not set off another round for everybody; all basic industries, except steel and John Lewis' coal diggers, had already got a raise since the Korean war began. Before Ewan Clague's cost-of-living index inched up again, there was a good chance that some kind of wage and price controls would be clamped on. When that happened, the brief, happy, between-wars interlude of freedom in the market place will be gone...
...slur on the Council's achievement during Mr. Zurier's term; they specifically objected to the use of the word "purge" in connection with the results of last February's elections; and they asserted that the vote of confidence which Mr. Zurier received at that time was a fairer index of the Council's sentiment...
...stocks, it was bad news for war-inflated commodities. At week's end grains, wool, hides and cocoa went tumbling in the futures market. So did cotton, which a few days earlier had reached its highest price (44.14? a Ib.) since the Civil War. The Dow-Jones futures index plunged 5.71 points, a record break for a single day, and lowest since...