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.

  • bitwise@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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%

      This is definitely not accurate. 7% compounding inflation every year is significantly more purchasing power lost than anything we’ve seen.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So you’re probably wondering how it’s possible that the dollar supply has been expanding at over 7% for the past 52 years, but inflation has only been 3% on average. The answer is that CPI data is designed to underreport inflation.

        Yeah there’s so much wrong here that it’s difficult to know where to start. I guess maybe let’s start with, inflation isn’t determined by how many raw dollars are printed, and population rises aren’t being taken into effect, both of which will heavily change his end result.

        • novibe@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Mfs still subscribe to inflation theory from 200 years ago smh…

          Money is printed in accordance to inflation, among other things, but it’s not the cause. Ffs. The US printed trillions during and after the 2008 crash and there was barely any inflation then.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Glad to see this here. The way some leftists are repeating libertarian talking points about inflation these days is disturbing.

            • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              It’s intuitive because it follows from personal experiences with money. Having read and seen information on this, perhaps what gave me the clearest intuition was Randall Wray’s intro to MMT lectures. Perhaps throwing one of the simplest ones at leftists spouting this stuff would work for them too.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Seriously someone thinks that inflation is equal to increase in money supply? 🤦‍♂️🤦🤦‍♀️

    • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.