Union Pay Gains Averaged Only 2.4% in ‘84, U.S. Says

Major collective bargaining settlements last year provided wage increases of 2.4%, the lowest figure for private industry since the federal government began keeping statistics 17 years ago, the Labor Department said Thursday.

A primary concern for union leaders at the bargaining table was to save jobs, and in exchange they often had to give up or scale back wage demands. Among the hardest hit were workers in the construction, automobile and airline industries.

Moderating consumer prices and lump-sum contracts in 1984 helped hold down the size of wage increases, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Workers under lump-sum contracts receive a payment that is not included in the wage rate.

Wage increases under 539 contracts covering 2.3 million workers averaged just 2.4% for the first year of the agreements and 2.3% annually over the life of the pacts, both new lows.

The previous lows, also less than 3%, were recorded in 1983, the bureau said.

Settlements in 1984 provided the smallest average wage boosts and the largest average wage decreases on record, the bureau said.

Three-fourths of the workers received wage increases of 3.8% in the first year of the contract; nearly 20% had no wage change, and the remainder took pay cuts.

About 119,000 workers suffered first-year wage cuts averaging 9.6%, the department said. About three-fifths of them were in the construction industry, the rest primarily in airline transportation and food stores.

“Subsequent wage increases will restore the cuts for about 20,000 of these workers, mostly in airlines and food stores,” the report said. “For the others, however, wage cuts will average 6.2% annually over their contract life.”

AFL-CIO spokesman Rex Hardesty expressed concern that the wage settlements ran behind the rate of inflation for the year.