Word: workers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...development that Economist Otto Eckstein calls "a major historical event." The sweep and intensity of the price rises are reducing living standards in the U.S. just as surely as a recession does. In February, though wage hikes had pushed dollar income to a record high, the average American worker's spendable income bought 4.5% fewer goods and services than it did a year earlier. For the middle class, inflation has struck out the article of faith that each year people would live at least a little better than the year before, but the hardest blow has fallen on the poor...
...bottlenecks in the labor market. Reducing unemployment at present is inflationary because many of the jobless are unskilled women, teen-agers and blacks who could not produce enough, at least initially, to justify their pay. The U.S. should fund a massive job-training program to equip these would-be workers with the skills to make them productive; Nixon's 1973 cutbacks in job-training programs were the worst sort of federal "economy." Beyond that, the U.S. labor market now does a haphazard job of matching workers' talents to available positions; employers and workers seek each other through state and private...
...trend ominous for other companies besides Fiat: in attempting to cope with Italy's social and economic problems, the government is burdening the private sector with more responsibilities than it can handle. Fiat has tried to help by building big new plants in the depressed southern Mezzogiorno and worker housing in its home city of Turin. Umberto Agnelli criticizes the unions for not taking these expenditures into account when pressing for wage increases to catch up with the cost of living, spiraling at the rate of 15.6% annually; but his greatest scorn is reserved for the government. "There...
...Thousand Clowns. "It's about this guy Murray, O.K. He runs this kiddie T.V. show. His 13-year-old nephew has all these different names. A social worker comes over and they mindfuck with the social worker. Once the old man--who says he and the kid's mother (who is Murray's sister) communicate mostly by rumor--yells up at an apartment, 'Hey there rich people. Come out at ten o'clock and play volleyball.' It's all a woof against capitalism." All this was said to us by a friend from the south side of our town...
What, then, is the point? Author Jacobson naturally does not offer road signs: "Meaning ½ Mile," or "Slow Down, Paradox Ahead." The Wonder-Worker seems to be yet another modern parable of total cultural disintegration...