Word: wage
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...perspiring heavily these days. The workers have stepped up their productivity 10% over the level of two years ago without any major improvement in the food-processing equipment at their disposal. Yet for all their labors, the workers are not getting more pay but less. Last March they accepted wage cuts of 17%, from $7.06 an hour to $5.85 for most packers. They had little choice: the new arrangement saved their jobs, which were threatened by low-priced frozen imports from Mexico and Central America...
...prolonged pay squeeze? By the early '80s, American wages in many sectors were ripe for attack because they remained too high in relation to industrial paychecks in the rest of the world. The porous U.S. economy made such an imbalance impossible to maintain as domestic goods suffered from an invasion of bargain-priced products from countries with lower wage scales: textiles and steel are prime examples. High unemployment during the recession of 1981-82 gave companies more leverage to seek wage concessions or at least hold the line. The newest challenge to wages has been the economy's takeover frenzy...
...Mello, 34, a divorced mother of three, dreads the arrival of next March because she is among 950 workers at the USS-POSCO steel mill in Pittsburg, Calif., who will suffer a 4.5% pay reduction at that time. For Mello, a junior-grade electrician, the change will reduce her wages from $14.37 an hour to about $13.73, a difference of $108 a month. Other workers elsewhere are getting raises, but the hikes are not enough to keep up with prices. Some 98,000 production workers in U.S. transportation-equipment industries got an average 2.5% wage boost over the past year...
Many workers have had to give up cost of living allowances, or COLAs, a form of wage protection that spread widely during the high-inflation 1970s. Many corporations are seeking to replace regular pay raises with annual bonus systems. These lump-sum payments, common in executive circles, expand and contract with a company's profitability. The advantage for employers is that the bonuses cost less over the long haul because they do not compound year after year, as raises do. Last October, Boeing reached an agreement with its machinists that froze basic wages while granting annual bonuses that will average...
...much as $4 billion in sales by 1990. Blue-chip giants stampeded to buy into the action; bankers panted to finance the heralded expansion. Optimism was seemingly unbounded for the U.S. robotics industry, which produced semi-intelligent machines that were expected to help American businesses compete with low-wage foreign rivals over the next two decades and to improve greatly the quality of American industrial production...