Word: wage
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...capacity production in such key industries as steel, autos, appliances. To describe this new phenomenon, economists have coined a new phrase: "cost-push" inflation. Some go on to contend that price boosts, such as the recent steel price rise, are caused primarily by the push of labor's wage demands. But is labor really to blame...
...first burst of postwar inflation came when pent-up demand and wartime savings caused such a scramble to buy that shortages turned up everywhere, and most businessmen cashed in by raising prices. Then came the Korean war, and once more a scramble for materials and goods sent prices soaring. Wages were slow in catching up. In fact, after General Motors set up the first automatic "annual improvement factor" increase in wage contracts in 1950, Charles E. Wilson, then G.M. president, said: "It is not primarily wages that push up prices. It is primarily prices that pull up wages." After...
...Disregarding temporary conditions of supply and demand, they began to set what Senator Kefauver and economists such as Edwin Nourse, ex-chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, call "administered prices"-prices that are set to achieve a predetermined profit level that will defray not only wage increases but also most of the expenses of new plant expansion...
...many economists, alarm over automatic wage increases and administered prices and the cost-push inflation they cause seems exaggerated. They point to the absence of factors that produce a runaway inflation, notably a shortage of goods and an excess of money. The soft spots in the economy are expected to prevent major wage increases from spreading through the entire economy, as in the past, just as the ample supply of goods is expected to check overall price boosts. Last week outgoing Treasury Secretary George Humphrey told the Byrd committee probing Administration fiscal policies that the Administration's tight-money...
...Steel President Hood, blaming the boost on rising labor costs, said that this week's wage increase will amount to 21? an hour, boost the corporation's annual labor costs by $87 million to $1,543,000,-ooo, which is a record high. But labor refused to have the price hike laid at its door. Said United Steelworkers' President David J. McDonald: "Even without raising prices and without obtaining greatest output per man-hour, the corporation is in a position to increase its net profit from $348.1 million in 1956 to $437 million in 1957." The steel...