Word: slashe
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Economic upheaval is to blame. First came the great inflation of the 1970s, which forced businesses to slash service to keep prices from skyrocketing. Then came deregulation, which fostered more price wars and further cutbacks. Meanwhile, service workers became increasingly difficult to hire because of labor shortages in many areas. At the same time, managers found that they could cut costs by replacing human workers with computers and self-service schemes. It all makes perfect bookkeeping sense for businesses, but the trend has left consumers without enough human faces to turn to for guidance in spending their billions of dollars...
Flight attendants, salesclerks and bank tellers all seem to have become too scarce and too busy to give customers much attention nowadays. As businesses have tried to slash costs over the years, the pay, training, prestige and performance of service personnel have suffered. As a result, consumers must be smarter and tougher than ever to get what they want. See ECONOMY & BUSINESS...
...Fine Gael party has been in a marriage-of-convenience coalition with the smaller Labor Party for four years. While civil divorce is still illegal in Ireland, political divorces are not -- and so last week the two parties split. Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald, the Fine Gael leader, wanted to slash social spending as part of a program to reduce a $2 billion budget deficit. Labor ministers, who preferred to increase taxes instead, promptly resigned...
Like most people, highly placed public servants yearn for fatter paychecks. Unlike most people, some of those public servants -- namely, Congressmen -- are in a position to vote raises for themselves. Or cuts. In the Depression year of 1932, a politically prudent concern for seemliness prompted Congress to slash its salaries 10%. That is not likely to happen in 1987. But as members of the 100th Congress weigh the very real financial needs of officials in all branches of Government, including themselves, they are painfully aware of how public sentiment is running. During a call-in poll last month, ABC television...
...most intense. It may also have been the most fickle. As quickly as it became a hot issue, the drug crisis became, in the press and in Washington, last year's trend. In his fiscal-1988 budget plan last week Reagan beat a quiet retreat: he proposed a slash of $913 million, to about $3 billion, in funds for fighting drug abuse. Grants to state and local governments for drug law enforcement would be eliminated, and funding for drug education and treatment would be trimmed. Said Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston, S.C., who heads the U.S. Conference of Mayors...