Word: wage
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
World-wide was last week's interest in the Depression's wage scale. At Rome, Prime Minister Mussolini, boastful of how all Europe had followed his policy of scaling wages down to meet retail prices, announced that, for Italy, a limit for such cuts had been reached "beyond which the antidote may become a poison" (see p. 19). In London, figures were collected which revealed that 1,500,000 British workers, including some of the most militant unions, had last month accepted deep pay cuts with quiet resignation. And in Washington, despite ominous news from his Department...
Like all other chiefs of state, President Hoover receives influential men of business unofficially and without formal appointment to hear their private reports on industrial conditions. Of late these callers have been confiding to the President their difficulties in maintaining his wage scale while commodity prices were falling. Outside the White House they repeated their laments in the hearings of newshawks. Last week in so reliable a Republican print as the New York Herald Tribune President Hoover was depicted as waging a stiff backstage "struggle" to uphold his pay policy "in the face of a strong movement in financial circles...
With Democrats clamoring for identification of the wage-cutting "financial interests," President Hoover next day put a bright face on the situation. He did not deny pressure by individual industrialists on him to sanction reductions. But he did deny the existence in the land of any "organized movement to cut wages." He was "thoroughly satisfied" that the "leading industries" were keeping faith with the White House...
...alert United Press interviewed business leaders who attended the 1929 White House conferences, discovered an agreement among them that Industry, by & large, had lived up to its wage pledge. Pierre Samuel Du Pont (I. E. du Pont de Nemours & Co.), Walter Sherman Gifford (American Telephone & Telegraph). Jesse Isidor Straus (R. H. Macy & Co.) declared their companies had not reduced their wage scales since 1929. Walter Clark Teagle said his Standard Oil of New Jer sey had found it necessary to cut workers' weekly earnings by part-time employment but that the base pay rate had been maintained. Distinctly...
...size and extent of wage cuts have kept the country's best statisticians at work for months. The national industrial conference board estimates that the wage scale in this Depression has declined 3% but that earnings have dropped 20% because of layoffs and part-time employment. The A. F. of L. concurs in this estimate, sets lost earnings at ten billion dollars per year. Meanwhile the U. S. Department of Labor reports that commodity prices have decreased 21% since July, 1929 while industrial payrolls are down 13%. Last February, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, 228 industrial establishments...