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which has generally outpaced increases in the consumer price index for a chance to prove himself and to his boss that his individual efforts are worth rewarding and will be rewarded.” And apparently an announcement was put out to the staff saying, “It is not the purpose to save a single dollar of compensation. We simply want to shift the balance toward individual contribution and away from mathematical formulas.” Does that-

Oh, yeah. That does refresh my mind. When I said to you earlier that we exchanged money to maintain management prerogative, we not only increased the wages quite a lot over the years, but agreed to move the categories of employees up and indeed getting up to a point where here was a squeeze and there were annual increases over five years. And it got to the point where people were getting automatic increases and very few were getting merit increases. And we came to the conclusion that we were in effect paying the poor performer just about the same as the good performer, and that this was a very dangerous course to pursue for any length of time. And we decided that we were not going to pursue it. We wanted to create pools--we were willing to guarantee a pot of money that would go to employees category by category, but not flat across. We would reserve the right to give somebody a fifteen percent increase and somebody else a five percent increase instead of giving everybody a ten percent increase.

What happened during the course of the strike?