Offering steep discounts to seasonal employees and lifting wages may squeeze retailing profits, particularly if sales this holiday season are anything less than stellar.

They will lift eastern wages to western levels by mid-1996, two years later than the earlier contract.

And across the region, businesses in developing economies are feeling pressure from workers like Mr. Situmorang to lift wages.

Rapid economic growth has not been sufficient to lift real wages.

They sensibly call for more tightly drawn agreements that lift wages for foreign workers and improve working conditions.

Less pressure to lift wages means less pressure to raise prices to cover the higher labor costs.

The strong growth has lifted wages and salaries throughout the work force - although, adjusted for inflation, for the most part they are not back to levels reached in the 1970's.

That working relationship was cemented when management and labor lobbied Albany together in late 2001 to pump funds into the health care field to lift wages.

The big worry for the bank is that rising inflation will fuel inflation expectations, although it is questionable whether that would feed through to lift wages given high unemployment.

The survey concluded that job training lifted wages.