Economy improves; bargaining problems persist in 1983, (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, January 1984

Economy improves; bargaining
problems persist in 1983

George Ruben

In late 1982, the Nation began to emerge from a 16-month recession and economic indicators generally showed continuing improvement in 1983:

Unemployment, which reached a 42-year high in December 1982, declined 2.4 percentage points, to 8.4 percent in November 1983¹
Civilian employment rose to 102.7 million workers in November, from 99 million 12 months earlier.
Consumer prices rose less than 3 percent during the 12 months ending in October 1983, compared with about 5.0 percent during the preceding 12 months.
Productivity for all persons in the business sector of the economy increased 3.5 percent during the four quarters ending with September 1983, which was the largest increase for any comparable period since 1976.

Despite the improvement in the economy, several major industries, and their employees, continued to struggle with problems that resulted from economic policies, and from other factors such as the growing inroads by foreign producers, shifts in customer preference, and plant obsolescence. Clearly, the domestic policy of deregulation of industry increased competition in the airline and trucking industries, resulting in the entry of new firms, the closing of others, employee concessions on compensation, and high unemployment.

This excerpt is from an article published in the January 1984 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes

1 The discussion of economic measure in this article is based on the information available in early December.

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