Word: wages
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sure, it was all important. The Consumer Price Index actually went down in December by .3%, only its second monthly decline in more than 17 years (the other also occurred under Reagan, last March). For all of 1982, prices rose a mere 3.9%, the smallest increase since 1972, when wage and price controls were in effect. Since Reagan took office the rate of inflation has been reduced by more than two-thirds, an achievement the President will crow about, with justification, in the State of the Union speech...
...strike threat has the companies groping for a wage deal by spring...
...expected to begin boosting steel orders from such big-ticket industry customers as automakers and capital-goods manufacturers. Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, which alone buys 7% of the steel industry's output, has already warned Lloyd McBride, president of the United Steelworkers of America, that unless wage talks between the companies and the U.S.W. are settled by March, GM will not hesitate to turn to Japanese and European suppliers for its steel. Other big users of steel would doubtless choose the same route to ensure supplies, in the process cutting off the steel companies from the orders...
Whatever the outcome of the wage negotiations, steelmen face equally formidable long-term problems. While foreign producers have shifted over increasingly to highly efficient "continuous casting" techniques for steelmaking, U.S. firms still rely heavily on much more costly and labor-intensive processes. Though U.S. companies had been planning to spend upwards of $7 billion during 1982 on new investment to upgrade their plants, plunging sales have so severely crimped their cash that most new capital-expenditure plans have now either been put on hold or abandoned entirely...
...China has balked. It argued that, since it runs an annual trade deficit of $600 million with the U.S., it should be allowed a growth rate closer to 6%. That is anathema to U.S. textile producers and labor organizations; they claim that U.S. manufacturers are being undercut by low-wage producers in Asia...