Word: waged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their last meeting, but Carter did not refer to it. Instead, the Administration plans to try to work around the imperious A.F.L.-C.I.O. leader. Said Carter: "We have gotten some good response from the leaders of international unions. The retail clerks, for instance, just recently endorsed the proposal of wage increases being less than the previous two years on the average. But working people have to see first that some restraints are going to be placed on professional fees, like dentists and doctors, and on prices charged, like GM and AT&T, before they are willing to sacrifice their wage...
...predicted that the postal workers would cooperate, but the demands that the union placed on the table last week were not exactly encouraging. In addition to an increase in a cost-of-living escalator that offsets 65% of the prevailing inflation rate, the union called for a 7% wage increase in the first year and 5% in the second-all in all, a good bit more than the Administration had been hoping for. Said James LaPenta, a key postal union negotiator: "What the Administration has done is self-defeating. Management now feels that it is backed...
Officials on the Council on Wage and Price Stability admit that Carter's anti-inflation policy has no hope of succeeding unless unions begin accepting smaller pay increases than they have come to expect in the past several years. Says COWPS Director Barry Bosworth: "Labor groups did not cause the food and energy price increases that initiated this inflation, but they are part and parcel of the process that keeps it going. We will just never achieve deceleration if each group waits for the others to act first...
Union leaders complain that far more is being asked of wage earners than of anyone else. One contentious point is Carter's request that top company executives restrict their salary increases to 5% as a symbolic gesture for rank-and-file workers to follow. Complains United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser: "A 5% limit for people like General Motors Chairman Thomas Murphy, who makes just short of $1 million a year, is no great concession to fighting inflation...
...gulf between Carter and the union leaders has been especially wide and deep since the President met with AFL-CIO Chief George Meany several weeks ago and tried-in vain-to sweet-talk him into supporting a general wage hold-down. As a union official who attended that White House session told TIME Correspondent Richard Hornik: "Carter came in with his little sermonette, and when we did not accept everything he said, he stopped listening to us. He should realize that meetings like these are not Sunday school...