You have it backwards IMHO - prices have gone up for the last 40 years with very little wage movement. It got bad enough "people refused to work" just to starve either way. At least some companies have also been forced to cut prices because people just couldn't afford to buy the product anymore. We can argue about Wage Price spirals being good or bad, but it seems to me like a slow price-wage spiral is the Federal Reserves policy - they want 2% inflation, well that inflation has to apply to wages also.
Wage-Price spiral ... meaning people gettign raises BECAUSE OF INFLATION is not a good thing
(I'm not claiming I expect inflation to spike again. I don't, but reality is reality. Someone got a 6% raise when inflation was running @ 7%. Awesome, I guess.
Sure, but I'm talking about ~ 30% seen across people switching jobs into the same position but at a higher pay at another company, retention raises in the same place, and reported union contracts.
What? Productivity? Do you think "Productivity" is a "thing" rather than really just a calculation?
any idea what inflation-adjusted productivity has been for the last 2 yrs?
any idea how many FULL-TIME jobs have been added over the last 2 yrs?
any idea how much guesstimating goes into the calculation of "productivity"?
I didn't mean to reference productivity - just that some jobs won't pay enough to get workers, and yet we "need" that to be done, so we're deploying automation. Clearly there are staffing shortages, and with demographic trends, we're going to see less available workers as time goes on unless we massively overhaul immigration, and globally it's unclear if that will actually "solve" stuff with the decline in more and more countries. But it should get the US through my lifetime anyway. So as we have less and less working age people, and more and more retired people because of population decline, wages will trend upwards IMO just due to scarcity, except where we can deploy automation and eliminate the positions.
