Word: nonfarming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...good. Investors cheered as reports came from the Geneva meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that the producers would cut oil prices (see following story). The news buoyed hopes that inflation would remain low in 1985. In addition, the Labor Department reported that the productivity of U.S. nonfarm workers--their output per hour worked--rose at an annual rate of 1.7% in the fourth quarter of 1984, a sharp rebound from the 1.1% decline of the previous three months. For 1984 as a whole, productivity increased 3.1%, far more than the average annual gain of 1% from...
Statisticians try to frame the question in purely objective terms, but any answer is bound to have political overtones: Who is poor? Currently, the Government's official definition of poverty is based solely on cash income. A nonfarm family of four, for example, was considered to be poor if its annual income in 1981 was less than $9,290. This standard, however, does not take into account noncash benefits like food stamps, medical care and subsidized housing. Since 1965, the market value of those benefits has grown from $2.2 billion to more than $72 billion, and the programs account...
With two of the three legs of the retirement stool wobbly, people are looking more closely at their private pension programs. There are about half a million private employer pension plans that cover more than 75% of America's nonfarm workers over age 25. Unlike Social Security, private pension plans are not directly affected by the problem of the aging labor force because companies build up their employees' retirement funds during the employees' working years. Explains Barnet Berin, of William M. Mercer, a New York-based compensation consulting firm: "The private pension system puts in contributions that...
Even if the Democratic coalition can be tugged back together, many of the party's basic elements are dwindling in numbers and clout. Union membership is declining, down from about a third of all nonfarm workers in the mid-'50s to less than a fourth today. Blue-collar workers are a shrinking minority of the work force (33%); white-collar workers have become an outright majority (51%). Fourteen of the 20 biggest U.S. cities, traditional Democratic strongholds, lost population during the 1970s, some drastically, as residents moved to the largely Republican suburbs. The cities that did gain in population tended...