Don’t forget the company meetings where leadership says things like “this is the best quarter we have ever had”, along with “we need to work harder to stay competitive”. Sigh.
The productive capabilities of the country haven’t ceased to exist. As long as that remains true, inflation is going to create wacky, uncertain, annoying situations, but it doesn’t have to provoke severe destitution as long as other safety nets are in place.
Steve, if you keep complaining with your coworkers, you’ll be fired. You know what, you’re fired. And your coworkers, too, the company can’t keep up with your expenses.
You guys need to unionize and fight for raises that exceed the inflation rate. Here in Brazil, we have this in almost every type of labor.
Five years ago, the right-wing began dismantling the unions’ monetization system in an attempt to break them, and they also raised the retirement age. However, the unions are still doing their job, and every year we receive a raise above inflation.
The current left-wing government has already said that they are working to recover a monetization system for unions. They are studying a way to implement this in a manner that will make it difficult for a future government to repeal.
In many places they wouldn't be falling behind if dirt poor people weren't frothy-mouthed cheering for trust fund inheritor babies who only pay attention to hot escorts and dad's hedge fund lawyers.
The cult of personality that adheres to the philosophy of being “self-made” doesn’t help, but anti-union practices by the US’ ruling class have been exercised since the industrial revolution, and meanwhile government has hardly ever stepped in to regulate or break monopolies.
Some industries like programming are not quite as simple to get unionization going. Pretty much only public sector jobs have unions when it comes to programming. I wish that weren’t the case. On the flip side though, the abundance of programming jobs (when there isn’t a damn near tech recession) makes switching jobs to get a huge raise pretty clearly the way to go.
And by pay employees less, what do you mean? Like relative to inflation? Or is there a company that actually lowered hourly wages?
I can sort of agree with the charge more part I guess. But it’s pretty obvious that inflation is largely caused by increasing the money supply. This has been shown repeatedly throughout history and isn’t really debatable unless I’m missing something. It’s sort of like how the more slices you cut a pizza into, the smaller the slices become. Charging more for the pizza, paying the pizza employees less or the pizza company making more money doesn’t impact slice size unless they increase the number of slices or the size of the pizza itself.
Haha what? This was a hypothetical comparison of the number of pizza slices per pizza and inflation. These pizza employees do not exist, but if they did I would support them being paid more not less.
It does when the price of things goes up (especially on essentials) and creates profits and no one is paid enough to live but creates those profits.
If my employer refuses to pay me a living wage even though they can, I can't magically buy a new car if I need one, especially if the prices on cars went up by, example, 30%. ESPECIALLY if my employer refuses to pay me more.
It's inflated TWICE actually because the price goes up normally, and again because my pay did not increase. My pay actually took a loss because it didn't get raised enough to be proportional to x% inflation.
This is why rightoids don’t care what leftists have to say about the economy fam. It doesn’t matter to them if your overall point is correct when you go around redefining words to fit the agenda just because you don’t know the actual terms.
You could have tossed out terms like purchasing power, cost of living, or even just slapped “effective” in front of inflation to sound like you remember your high school economics but instead you decided to call a deflationary pressure double inflation.
I went to private religious school dude, we did rosaries, not economics.
This is under the "I don't have to be a pilot to know an airplane doesn't belong in a tree" stuff, and if righties don't acknowledge basics like that, THAT is why we can't have nice things.
You’re missing a shitload. “Government bad” ideological blinders will do that though, so here’s some info to get caught up in case you’re capable of a good faith discussion or just want to know what is really happening:
Just heard there are no merit raises this year bc the company is hurting. Started looking for a new position since I doubt they will make up for the lack of a raise next year.
It’s almost as though the governments should do their jobs and fucking put cost controls. Seriously, we need some new economic thought/ practice. Just like how several generation’s ago they figured out that wages are sticky, they need to put cost caps or restrictions to stop this shit. Instead of cutting the money supply and people’s lifelines, they need to fucking tell businesses to cut the crap and stop the bullshit. Since then pandemic every industry feels like they can price gouge and get away with it. It’s fucking ridiculous. If you put a stop to that, then you have some hope of resigning in inflation.
I’d rather have a windfall tax that taxes some high percentage of all profits beyond a certain percentage in order to disincentivize this sort of profiteering.
Price caps set to low cause this. Luckily we have a lot of data available nowadays and with AI a more managed economy should be a no brainer. Pretending reigning in price gouging will cause shortages is disingenuous. Although the best way to handle this would be to increase competition.
Basic economics says this only happens when the cap is set to low but it is entirely possible to adjust accordingly as seen in systems like universal healthcare. Thanks for the sophomoric understanding though it really added to the conversation /s
Starvation isn’t a widespread issue in either the US or the EU. We aren’t spending 80% of the typical family income on food in either location. This isn’t South Sudan or a nation similarly undeveloped, where families are scratching at subsistence farming.
If you capped the price of bread at, say, $1 a loaf, then bakeries would want to sell for less in order for retailers to sell for that one dollar figure. Which means baking loads for a percentage of that $1, which means reducing the local price of wheat to match. In a location where the price of a loaf of bread is $2 a loaf, then they can pay more or less twice as much for wheat.
Basic supply-demand equation. Econ 101.
The point here is that if you break the supply-demand equation by instituting a cap on the price of bread, you’re moving the supply down while moving the demand up as more people seek to buy bread and it becomes a much less attractive product to bake and sell. Barring subsidies to producers and retailers to support the price cut - at which point, we may as well just centrally distribute bread - then there will be unfulfilled demand, since the price cannot rise enough to motivate supply to meet demand.
A price cap moves the measurement point in that graph away from equilibrium and shifts both lines to the left. The gap in between is unfulfilled demand.
It is like a jet plane passing overhead with you isn’t it? Not even disagreeing with you just pointed out your simple explanation is right only if you set the price too low. Then I mentioned competition is the best way to handle it which you restated like you were correcting an imaginary straw man. Needless to say your basic econ lesson breaks down whenever the price fails to be elastic which happens quite often.
True. What we need is to remove the underlying problem, which is the profit motive to overcharge and underpay. That is, democratic worker-owned companies, answerable to employees instead of shareholders
Those companies exist but are generally not competitive in terms of the product delivered to the consumer, largely because of a lack of ability to adapt to serve the needs of the market. They’re focused on their employees instead of their businesses and end up getting outcompeted for a variety of reasons.
WinCo is mostly employee owned but is run as a privately held business by its board of directors, not the workers. It’s run like a normal company, more or less, although employee ownership does mean employees have more of a voice when it comes to business decisions.
In Belgium we have automatic wage indexation based on inflation of certain product. Some right wing parties want to get rid of it, but luckily it’s still here.
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