Word: mavericks
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SOARING construction wages are the frequent butt of jokes by comedians and cartoonists. "Plumbers make so much money these days that they have to work about a week, with overtime, to pay for a Ford Maverick," gibed Tennessee Ernie Ford in a recent radio commercial. What was once mere grumbling has lately turned to alarm among businessmen, economists and Government officials. They reason that unless the U.S. finds a way to stop exorbitant pay increases in construction, the pattern will continue to spread into many other industries and to undermine the nation's fight against inflation. The problem...
Naturally, Stone has been labeled a maverick, muckraker, Cassandra, curmudgeon, gadfly and guerrilla. All of which are pretty respectable terms these days. At 63, "I've graduated from being a pariah to a character," Stone says with a kind of inverse pride. "If I last long enough, I'll have a certain amount of credibility and weight." Politically, he considers himself to be just about what a leading adversary, Spiro Agnew, says he is: a well-ripened radic-lib. "I was a New Lefty before there was a New Left," he brags...
...lacocca thought he had it made. After slogging his way up from sales trainee to vice president at age 36, he masterminded Ford Motor Co.'s happy successes with the Mustang and the Maverick. So lacocca figured that he was a cinch to take over the president's chair when Arjay Miller stepped down three years ago. But then a gray-haired 55-year-old named Semon E. Knudsen got passed over for his dad's old job as president of General Motors. Henry Ford II snapped up Knudsen for the Ford job and let lacocca wait...
Ford Motor could not have picked a more crucial moment to tap lacocca's well-incubated talents. Despite the company's present good fortune with the Maverick and the Pinto, profits are being squeezed hard by rising costs and Government pressure for safety and antipollution development. Just after his appointment. lacocca declined a $100 bet on whether Henry Ford's prediction of a 9.7-million-car year was possible in 1971. "Consumers have the money," he said, "but in their present mood it is doubtful that they will spend it. We have just finished an auto strike...
...maverick, with supporters and detractors in both camps...