Word: wages
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LIKE the Nixon administration, Harvard likes to ask those who can afford it least to bear inflation's burdens. This year, 36 members of the Graphics Arts International Union, with wages ranging from $110 a week for some typesetters to $240 a week for certain classes of pressmen, are striking for 10-to 14-per cent wage increases...
...been, the raging U.S. inflation would have been much worse if it had not been for the almost saintly patience that workers have shown in accepting modest wage increases. Now the patience seems to be evaporating. A sudden upsurge in pay raises threatens to give the inflationary spiral another whirl...
...twelve months through April, average hourly wages of U.S. private nonfarm workers rose a mere 6.3%, trailing far behind a 10% rise in consumer prices. But in May, the first month after the death of wage-price controls, workers' wages rose at a stunning annual rate of 19.1%. Though that probably was a statistical fluke, Otto Eckstein, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists, calculates that wages and benefits for the current quarter will go up at an annual rate of 9.2%, and that the rate will rise, to 9.8% in the fourth quarter. Experts...
...Escalator. Workers are showing a new determination to strike, if necessary, to win catch-up wage increases. In the first week of June, more than 300,000 workers were idle in 523 strikes, the highest number for a comparable week in 15 years. Last week some 110,000 strikers in the men's clothing industry went back to work under a contract that will raise their pay about 10% the first year (see following story). Escalator clauses in union contracts are further increasing pay; Eckstein calculates that an escalator in the steel pact will raise wages in that industry...
Reversing the speedup in wages will be difficult, if not impossible. Workers have a genuine grievance: as pay has trailed prices, inflation has lowered their standard of living. David Grove, also of TIME'S Board of Economists, figures that real disposable personal income (that is, take-home pay adjusted for price increases) has dropped for the past four quarters; in the first quarter of 1974 it fell at an annual rate of 5.6%. That is a longer and deeper drop in purchasing power than occurred during any of the five recognized U.S. postwar recessions. Unfortunately, employers cannot absorb outsized...