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The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

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Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally in my business I saw effectively no churn in employment through most of the pandemic. Hiring new people was also nearly impossible. Then, towards the end of last year a significant number of workers quit. Finding new people to replace them also was surprisingly easy. I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confid…

This is exactly it. The so-called "great resignation" is just pent-up delayed demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic. It's framed this way as click-bait. Of course people click on stories about quitting work because they dream of doing that themselves.

It also feeds into a narrative that everybody is doing fine, and the ones who aren't are just lazy and don't want to work.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#372
post #20

I think too its a result of 30 years where employers have had the upper hand in the job market (except perhaps 1999, 2008). Wages have stagnated during these decades, it seems finally maybe wages can catch up.

Hell no wages aren't catching up, even getting a 50% increase in salary (with considerable effort on my part i might add) i realize that most expenses have gone up 20-40%. Rent was 1400, now its 1850. Renters insurance was about $130, just yesterday i paid $230. Houses that were selling for 500k near my house have gone to 800-900k. Even after working my ass off to get a higher paying job, i feel no richer than i did when i had my last job, i can't even imagine what people who haven't gotten raises are feeling.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#373

"Yet, despite all the quitting and renegotiating, the real wage for the average American worker — meaning the true value of their paycheck after taking into account inflation — fell by 2.4% in 2021." All while the world's elites have doubled or tripled their fortunes. Great Robbery would be a more apt name than Great Resignation.

My understanding is that the bottom of the wage scale have seen the biggest gains, in real terms ( https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/inflation-wages-low-income-wo... ). Its the middle and upper middle class that are being made (a little) poorer by inflation. A fine trade-off imo. And given the asymmetry of the risks policy makers faced (great depression vs higher than average inflation), they wisely went with the risk o…

The idea that "printing money leads to inflation" is startlingly overblown as the most impactful source of what causes it. It certainly can; but its explicative popularity is mostly the result of it being really easy to explain to children ("if you have two candy bars, wouldn't you feel that each bar is worth less?")

Or, more accurately: if everyone has more money, wouldn't demand for goods & services go up? And per the law of supply & demand, if demand goes up, prices should go up. And, per how inflation is calculated (CPI), if prices go up, inflation is on the rise. That's a lot of steps to get from "printing money" to "the value of the US dollar decreases".

It certainly can cause, and is a component of today's, inflation. But there are three confounding factors:

First: We're in an unprecedented economic climate, yet we still apply many of the laws of economics written during the Gold Rush. Today, its reasonable to assume that many people have a "demand maximum"; outside of a few high value commodities (houses and cars being the two biggest), there's only so many CPI-included goods & services which can see significantly increased consumer demand given a larger money supply. Food doesn't really see increased demand. Housing and Living supplies don't. Maybe you splurge on a PS5 (if you can find one, see (3)) or a bigger TV.

Houses & Cars, being the two biggest areas people will splurge, and related to that, Rent, are seeing massive price inflation. Which leads to:

Second: All else being equal, the average consumer sitting near a "demand maximum" socioeconomic point should mean that they're sitting on more money in a bank account. But, most aren't. The fundamental reasoning for this is complex, but it boils down to: most of the money being printed by the Fed isn't entering consumer pockets. On the contrary, most Fed policies have hurt consumers more than helped; because of rising real estate prices, which are in no-small-part due to low interest rates, housing & rent prices have skyrocketed, which mostly hurts consumers. QE over the past decade has lined American company balance sheets to unprecedented values, but that money hasn't trickled down to front-line workers in any meaningful sense; all it really serves to do is inflate stock prices, which destabilizes the stock market and makes for fun Forbes headlines about the richest Americans getting even richer (on paper).

Third: Biggest: Supply chain shock. CPI is calculated based on the price of consumer goods. Supply & Demand overwhelm the pricing decisions of most consumer goods. Some products are experiencing demand shock; but nearly everything is experiencing supply shock right now. Blame COVID. Blame China & Russia. Blame capitalism's tendency toward hyper-optimization creating a brittle supply chain.

Overall point being: Many correctly associate the word "inflation" to mean "weakening of the US dollar", but then incorrectly extrapolate it to mean "weakening of the US dollar relative to other currencies". The reality is exactly what's written on the box: its weakening relative to what you'd buy with it. And if its happening to most currencies (as it is, today); its not a currency issue, it's a supply/price issue. I'd argue not only is it not clear that Fed spending is causing inflation; its most probable that it isn't, and Fed spending over the past two years has been a positive, invisible force against higher inflation.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#374
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. Very personal opinion ahead (and not tailored to this specific topic): that's most journalism for you. They're not here to "inform the citizen" as a noble mission. Most of the things the press publishes are greatly exaggerated and dramatic to evoke different emotions to the reader which are closely tied to an agenda. The fix is IMHO easy…

I don't think that this is a particularly controversial opinion now . A decade ago, maybe. Half a century ago, certainly. But now , in 2022, I think that you could probably find even objective evidence that the median quality of journalism has significantly declined and moved from objective facts to cherry-picking emotionally-laden stories to push a narrative. Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt…

> Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions.

This is a positive development. The problem is when motives are concealed, as in "objective" journalism.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#375

I think it's a bit of both. It's not only about the money. Many people are realising just now that they don't get paid enough to take all the crap they get from work. Anecdotally, I know a handful of engineers who quit their jobs because of this. They were making good money, just not good enough for the number of sleepless nights and stressful days they were going through.

what are they doing now though? Eventually, the student loan repayment delay expires, the covid unemployment goes away, any eviction moratoriums expire, and on top of it everything is more expensive than it was. I hope people who are leaving their jobs for less stressful or more accommodating jobs are increasing their income levels as well. There's going to be a big bill due when all the covid relief measures and savings evaporate.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#376

> The Great Renegotiation is also a byproduct of inflation. Workers are seeking better pay to keep up with the rising cost of living. Keeping in mind small business is collectively the largest employer and contributor to US output... let's remember the coming rate hikes will greatly reduce available cash to small businesses that operate with credit lines, credit card debt or via home equity lines. That is a LOT of US…

Aren't small businesses best positioned to adapt to these changes? It's not like they're sitting on piles of cash or other investments that are losing value. If costs go up they'll have to raise prices, just as the prices for what they're buying went up due to rising costs further upstream. I figured the pandemic cleared out most of the small businesses that would have failed within five years anyway (half do). I wou…

I would argue they are not positioned well at all. Generally small businesses have limited inventory and limited cash on hand. So they have to now buy their inputs at an increased price while attempting to raise prices to sell outputs to customers that are cutting back due to their own reduced purchasing power. They then lose employees to businesses that are able to offer raises to their employees. They are also generally more limited in their access to capital than the larger companies.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is that while a 5% raise and 5% inflation should be a wash, since you now pay slightly more taxes than before your pay after taxes is slightly less value than before. It's still very misleading to say "wage gains aren't good" though - the problem is not that you got a 5% raise, it's that inflation is 5% so you need a slightly-higher-than-inflation raise to keep up. If you didn't get a 5% raise you'd…

Presumably the tax brackets are linked to inflation too

Pretty sure they're not.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#378

> The Great Renegotiation is also a byproduct of inflation. Workers are seeking better pay to keep up with the rising cost of living. Keeping in mind small business is collectively the largest employer and contributor to US output... let's remember the coming rate hikes will greatly reduce available cash to small businesses that operate with credit lines, credit card debt or via home equity lines. That is a LOT of US…

The Fed cannot raise interest rates so high that the federal government becomes unable to afford the interest on the debt. I can't predict exactly what is going to happen, but serious shenanigans are a certainty.

on a positive note though the IRS now requires that all deposits of $600 or more are reported by the banks ensuring that people like servers and small business owners pay their proper share of taxes. So that should help the government pay the debt. We cant have the poor continuing to not pay their taxes and the rich are too expensive to audit. /s Or at least that's the message I am taking from the current administration that appeared to campaign on the opposite message but what do I know?

Edit: I should have made the /s more prominent. This is sarcasm.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#379

> But there are growing fears of a wage-price spiral in which workers, seeing rising prices, demand higher pay — and companies, having to pay their workers more, start charging higher prices. These higher prices lead workers to demand even higher pay, leading companies to charge higher prices, and so on. It's the inflationary cycle of nightmares. Can someone explain to me how this works? I'd assume wages to prices ar…

also they have to account for the ever increasing bonuses to the c-suite. See Chipotle.

"While Chipotle attributes raising menu prices to the growing price of labor, some analysts point to high CEO compensation as another factor. In 2020 CEO Brian Niccol took home $38 million, $1.24 million of which was his base salary. The rest was made up of other incentives and an annual bonus."

https://www.businessinsider.com/chipotle-is-raising-prices-b....

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are the rich and then there are the really rich, and then there are the unbelievably rich. I'll happily call a family earning 500k/y on two salaries in a small town where a million dollar home is literally a mansion on a hill "rich". Because they are. They just aren't as rich as the Trumps or Bezoss of the world.

What do you intend to connote by saying someone is "rich," though? What does it signify? If the definition of "rich" is "independently wealthy," that family certainly doesn't meet it. They still have to work for a living. If it means you never have to worry about where the next meal is coming from or losing the roof over your head, sure, a lot of people are "rich." And maybe this is better than 90% of humanity does,…

> They still have to work for a living.

No they don't. They could live in a median dwelling with a median income indefinitely on the interest of what they've saved over the past few years.

If you're saying that they have to work for the living that they're accustomed to, so does Musk.

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