- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.
That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.
And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.
“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.
Maybe I’m becoming too cynical, but the raises these unions have been settling on don’t really cover inflation over the periods where they received no increase.
These articles just feel like the media wings of these megacorps are trying to stroke our egos. “Yes, so much bargaining power!”
I can’t find the article I’m thinking of where someone used a bunch of privately sourced data to peg the average annual inflation at 7%, but this article shows how economists don’t even agree on what metrics to measure for calculating inflation.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp
Wages have kept up with inflation though, often exceeding it.
Here a link for the minimum wage.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/
The real problem is that wages have not tracked productivity growth. But unions will not be able to solve that, since a lot of workers haven’t actually gotten more productive.
Most productivity improvements are capital intensive investments in technology. You won’t be able to capture much of those gains through labour bargaining.
To really improve the economic standing of workers, we must distribute non-housing capital more equally among the whole population.
Start taxing large capitals and put things like IRA’s and 401K’s on steroids to grow the capital of normal people.
Actually, the graph you linked to shows a negative relationship between inflation and wages every single year since 1970. The minimum wage has effectively gone down due to inflation.
It does not.
2000 and 2010 directly contradict your statement.
From the caption of that graph.
Adding to this with a post I found on wallstreetbets.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/15uo06v/inflation_data_has_always_been_a_lie/
Not exactly a reputable source, but the OP does go through several key indicators and shows their math (with screenshots of a calculator, lol)