It never does. This is just accelerating the pandemic-era wealth transfer that started with the rich getting trillions to prop up their assets while everyone else got $600.
Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
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Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#12It is largely because of the power imbalance between capital and labor. Capital sets the prices of goods and also sets the price it pays for labor. The solution is strong and broad based labor unions, but capital has labor convinced that it is against their interest to organize. I hope this boils over and we start hanging capital from the street lights.
Why does the US, a society with low union membership rates have much higher median salaries both before and after taxes and government benefits than in Europe where there are lots of powerful unions?
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#13It is largely because of the power imbalance between capital and labor. Capital sets the prices of goods and also sets the price it pays for labor. The solution is strong and broad based labor unions, but capital has labor convinced that it is against their interest to organize. I hope this boils over and we start hanging capital from the street lights.
Calling for murder on HN? Let's see the mods reactions.
Capital also does not set the prices. The market does.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#14It never does. This is just accelerating the pandemic-era wealth transfer that started with the rich getting trillions to prop up their assets while everyone else got $600.
How did the rich get trillions to prop up their assets?
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#15It is largely because of the power imbalance between capital and labor. Capital sets the prices of goods and also sets the price it pays for labor. The solution is strong and broad based labor unions, but capital has labor convinced that it is against their interest to organize. I hope this boils over and we start hanging capital from the street lights.
Organizing is very hard, nobody wants to be the first nail to stick up.
You know what would be a good first step? Voting Democrat. Even if you're a communist who wants to murder rich people.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#16There is this 40% or so of the population that will not switch jobs. I don't know why you would ever give them a raise because as their reaction to it is just going be to complain and go back to work.
It's worth noting that switching jobs for pay raises is mainly a white collar thing. If you work in trucking for instance, where productivity is capped, worker differentiation is minimal (meaning two different truckers perform essentially identical work unlike engineers or salespeople), and where industry margins are thin, you'll top out relatively quickly. After that, switching companies isn't going to do all that much good for them.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#17Is this inflation due to expansion of the money base? Or inflation due to rising costs?
If the second one, there where is all that money going? Who is that "cost" that is benefiting?
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#18This isn’t exactly great news, but it’s probably not as bad as you think. It means that inflation is a tractable problem. The Fed as a lot of tools at its disposal (first of which is to take its foot off the gas). If we were in a situation where workers were demanding higher wages because they were expecting prices to go up, and businesses were raising prices to pay workers who were demanding higher wages, then we’d be in a much tougher spot. Wages not keeping up with prices means that’s not happening yet. By the end of next year, the narrative will shift away from rising inflation as the Fed tightens up, which will in turn cause inflation to fall.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#19Looking at the chart it's pretty obvious that wages aren't pegged to inflation in any way. You will always be paid based on the conditions of the labor market, not the price of an arbitrary basket of goods.
Heck you can see that wage growth outpaced inflation in ~10 of the last 12 years. Isn't that a good thing?
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#20We had an all-hands meeting recently where we got to submit anonymous questions. One of the questions was 'with inflation rising at 6%, will the company reconsider their 'standard' 2% raise?' The lady answering looks dead in the camera and goes 'Honestly? No' and goes on to talk about how we're reasonably competitive with the local market. Hey, credit where credit is due, at least she was a refreshingly straight shooter. It pretty much let everyone on the call know what they needed to do if they wanted a good raise.