IN THE US SOME 50 YEARS AGO WHEN MANUFACTURING STILL prospered widely, more than a third of the workforce belonged to a union. Today, barely a tenth of workers in private companies are unionized. Public support for organized labor also has slipped. Outsourcing, technology and economic restructuring have contributed to this decline. How products are made nowadays also bears some weight.

In an average year, approximately 98,000 Americans die from infections they acquire in hospitals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many and perhaps most of these deaths could be avoided if well-understood sanitary methods, such as proper sterilization of equipment and hand-washing, were followed. In addition to the toll from infections, medical mistakes kill 44,000-98,000 each year, states a report from the Institute of Medicine.

A glance at the slot holdings

IN SEPTEMBER, KUEHNE+NAGEL, A MAJOR LOGISTICS COMPANY BASED IN Switzerland, will descend upon Airbus's warehouses in France, Germany, the UK and Spain and shake things up a bit. Stock and equipment will be removed, people will be told to leave, doors will be bolted shut for what could be a long time.

The launch of a new aircraft engine or airframe program is always a historic event, so last month's Farnborough Airshow, while it may have lacked the frenzied commercial atmosphere of recent shows past, nevertheless will be remembered for many years to come for having had two such occurrences (p. 11). CFM International has joined Pratt & Whitney in the competition to supply the engine for the successor to the A320 and 737 whenever those platforms become available and Bombardier is attacking the bottom of that market with the CSeries aircraft, which also received the go-ahead.

United Airlines' decision to pull the plug on Ted, which it announced last month at the same time that it said it would retire 100 aircraft in response to the record surge in oil prices, means that the curtain finally has come down on what may be the US legacy airline industry's longest-lived and most futile effort to respond to the changing face of airline competition without fundamentally altering its business model.

he proposed merger between Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines may be the first comprehensive US airline restructuring since United Airlines purchased Pan American's Pacific Division in 1985 in which the international implications of the transaction will garner the most attention from federal regulators.

MOST OF THE YEAR, THE WEATHER IN PUERTO VALLARTA IS SPLENDIDLY consistent. Sunny skies prevail with temperatures hovering around 25 deg. C (77 deg. F). Late April is no different, even with more than 500 airline suppliers in town. They came for ALTA's CCMA meeting. So did 60-some airline representatives, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean, a strong showing considering the economic challenges facing the industry.