Word: wages
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...salary. Union leaders closeted themselves with the new Chancellor after he returned from France for what was described by a union aide as an afternoon of "economic swordplay." Ernst Breit, leader of the country's 8 million-member German Trade Union Confederation termed the wage-freeze idea "totally unnegotiable." Even among pro-business spokesmen, who generally support Kohl, the wage-freeze idea was greeted with trepidation. Rolf Rodenstock, president of the Cologne-based Federation of German Industry, feared the plan would undermine public confidence. Said he: "I believe it is not a pillar of wisdom...
...because it lacked a guaranteed salary increase. Chrysler workers have gone two years without a pay boost of any kind, and they now make about $2.50 an hour less than their counterparts at Ford and General Motors. Instead of granting an immediate raise, however, the rejected pact called for wage hikes tied to future Chrysler profits. The settlement would also have restored a cost of living adjustment that would have taken effect in December and added about 500 an hour to the average worker's pay by the end of the contract...
...proposed agreement, however, would have continued UAW wage restraints aimed at restoring Chrysler's long-term corporate viability. Although the pact did reinstate the Cost-of-Living-Allowances that the workers gave up in 1979, it offered no immediate wage increases, and would have made future raises contingent on increases in Chrysler profits...
...arrest the desperate decline of the U.S. economy, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Col.), for instance, has proposed breaks for companies and unions that agree to hold down labor costs. And investment banker Felix Rohatyn, an advisor to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), has proposed government-sponsored wage restraint pacts modeled on the New York City rescue deal he helped to negotiate...
This potential predicament poses two alternatives to the "new cooperation," neither of which the apostles of re-industrialization are yet willing to contemplate openly. Heavily unionized industries can simply be left to with eyen more drastically than they already have, with companies transferring their production facilities to low wage countries abroad. Or corporations, in league with friendly elected officials, could push for new restraints on union democracy--and maybe even labor unionism itself...