Word: wages
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though many economists found Snedden's patchwork anti-inflation package of wage-price controls an unconvincing program, his emphasis on money matters put Whitlam on the defensive. Only midway through the campaign did Labor regain the initiative by pointing to its own inflation suppressants: a combination of tariff cuts and an upward revaluation of the Australian dollar. "It's possible to freeze meat and vegetables but not their prices," snorted the Prime Minister, knocking down the ON SERVICE idea of a wage-price freeze...
...With wage-price controls dead, some businesses are boosting prices in order to increase profit margins. Raw-material prices continue to soar: last week the island nation of Jamaica announced plans to triple taxes and royalties on bauxite exports. The move will force up aluminum prices in the U.S., which gets 60% of its bauxite from Jamaica. Also, predicts Joseph Pechman, the U.S. is "going to begin to see a wage-price spiral." Wages have been rising at an annual rate of only 6½% to 7%, but Pechman believes that unions in an era of soaring inflation will become...
Like the famed "bullet train" that rockets from Tokyo to Kyoto at 125 m.p.h., Japanese wage rates are rushing ahead at a speed unmatched anywhere else. In last month's shunto, or "spring offensive," Japanese unions won pay raises for 35 million workers averaging 31.4%-the biggest across-the-board increase on record for any industrialized society. The boosts will place many once lowly paid Japanese workers on a par with their European counterparts. The typical steel worker's pay (not including fringe benefits) rose from the 1973 level of $493 a month to $650. Auto workers...
...chance to either save his new-found wealth or spend it on the television sets and tape recorders that he makes, doubts spread as to whether anyone had really won any thing worthwhile. Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka warned that the big pay raises could set off a vicious wage-price spiral that would boomerang against consumers and threaten Japan's competitiveness in world markets. The workers themselves, who had gone so far as to stage a two-day transportation strike to press their demands, concede gloomily that most of their gains have al ready been wiped out by Japan...
...wage increase comes on top of earlier blows to the economy from yen appreciation and soaring oil prices. Already, electric-power rates are scheduled to rise in August by 40%, and shipping costs by one-third. Even before the wage increase, sales of Japanese automobiles in the U.S. were running at only 60% of 1973's level, in part because prices have climbed 5% to 10% above those of comparable American makes. A Toyota official says that the wage boost will force prices even higher this fall. The Industrial Bank of Japan predicts that by next year it will...