Word: bosworth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...watched by union leaders as indicators of future trends. The Administration is optimistic that the postal workers, whose talks enter the hard-bargaining phase this week, will cooperate. The outcome of the railroad workers' negotiations is less certain. Their contract expired at the end of last year, and Bosworth fears that the new package might well reach 30% or so in increases over the next three years. If that happens, even companies like Bethlehem Steel would have a bona fide excuse to start raising their prices all over again...
...consumer price index for April, due out this week, will be a "disaster," warns Barry Bosworth, director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability (COWPS). May's figures will not look much better, he adds, and prices will not start to level out until June at the earliest. Partly because of last winter's blizzards, food prices climbed 16.4% in the first quarter. Beef has jumped at an annual rate of 41 % since January, and wholesale prices are spurting, meaning that retail prices will continue to rise...
...Carter Administration is paying dearly for its past support of inflationary increases in such areas as farm price props, the minimum wage, and Social Security benefits and taxes. "It will take a long time to overcome the inflationary actions of last year," says Bosworth, but he adds that the Administration is at last "taking a tougher line on anything inflationary." Indeed, the President and private business people were pressing the anti-inflation campaign on several fronts last week...
Wages. In its first public blast at a labor negotiation, Bosworth's COWPS condemned as "clearly inflationary" a 25.5% three-year wage offer that West Coast employers presented to 21,000 pulp-and-paper mill workers. Both Bosworth and Charles Schultze, the President's chief economic adviser, fear that labor is coming to take for granted annual 10% wage increases. Unless the trend is reversed, says Bosworth, "we might as well forget about decelerating inflation any time in the near future...
That was the burden of a 15-page memo that Bosworth sent around to top Administration officials last month, outlining a number of concrete steps the White House could take to get its own affairs in order. The best evidence of Bosworth's rising influence is that nearly all his suggestions now appear in the Cabinet-level decision paper on anti-inflation policy that is sitting on the President's desk. Says a White House aide: "Within the Administration his talents are well recognized. It's outside that he has problems. The presidents of these big corporations...