The bosses will never pay us our fair share unless we force them to
The bosses will never pay us our fair share unless we force them to
I like to think that I'm a very knowledgeable organizer, so if folks want some advice ask me in the comments!
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Somebody hasn't heard of inflation. If all wages go up, all prices also go up, so your purchasing power either stays the same or gets even worse.
Inflation has many causes. Workers deserve to be paid a living wage. A CEO shouldn't make millions while the lowest paid workers get paid dirt.
Nobody is even asking for huge raises. They just want to be able to pay their rent, which a lot of people can't do.
If you have another solution by all means, feel free to share.
We should fight to end precarity and poverty, but as long as there are oligarchs who bounce around in yachts, jets, and rockets, we should keep fighting.
Universal affluence accompanied by abundant leisure is a possibility now within reach.
That's definitely not true at all, but even if it was inflation is going up anyways without wage increases.
Yes, it is definitely true.
Literally, cost push inflation was just explained to you. In this case it is wage costs that increase, causing businesses to increase costs to adjust, causing increase in inflation which your wage cannot afford.
All businesses exist for profit. There is no other reason why they exist. But this does not mean all businesses exist for insane profit. Demand for higher wages because of record profits of corporations could see small businesses fail as they lose business from raising prices to stay on top of the new costs to remain operating,. This would ironically make the situation of the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer even worse, making your current situation retrospectively seem desirable.
There is much more to economics and inflation than "You make more; I make more."
Before screaming for more wage, you'd need to understand if your employer, your source of income, can actually afford it. If they can and aren't doing their bit to keep the economy healthy, then by all means, unionise.
The article you referenced contains the following excerpts:
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The existence of cost-push inflation is disputed. Dallas S. Batten described it as a myth...
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Milton Friedman criticised the concept of cost-push inflation... Friedman wrote, "the inflation arises from one and only one reason: an increase in a quantity of money."
Yeah. That's why it's a concept, not a rule. Economics is organic. There are many concepts that are applicable at times and not at others. Anyone that tries to conservatively apply a concept as a rule to something as organic as economics would be a moron.
Supply and demand; this much is true. The rest is conceptual. Inflation itself is a concept that can be argued if applied like it's a rule. It has many variables, but in most cases, cost and demand pushes are the concepts that can explain or understand different parts of it.
Of course, if greed is the main drive, neither cost or demand push concepts apply and go out the window.
The term used to describe cost-push inflation was not rule or concept, but myth.
Ultimately, as conceded by Friedman, hardly an advocate for workers rights, average prices ultimately reflect simply the relation between total real wealth and supply of money.
Well, since you read so many details of someone claiming it as a myth in the article, you'd have also astutely read the parts where real world examples were provided of it happening.
I think you'd find that someone claiming a concept as a myth is more focused on academic definement.
The Big Bang Theory is a theory, it does not make it a myth, though many would claim it is. Do you want to highlight them too? We run with it based on real world evidence supporting the concept, but it's not a rule.
Edit: Also, I'm not linking it to worker's rights. I don't know why you are. Simply providing further explaination of how workers costs can cause inflation like any other cost to businesses, be that oil, infrastructure, tax, etc. This is why we protect small and medium sized businesses as much as workers. Bad things happen if either are in financial dire.
I read the article.
The discussion is descending even below the level of pointlessness.
You are not even understanding basic terms.
A scientific theory is given as...
an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method...
In turn, a myth is given as...
A commonly-held but false belief, a common misconception; a fictitious or imaginary person or thing; a popular conception about a real person or event which exaggerates or idealizes reality.
The feeling is mutual.
I'd point out that I provided a concept used to explain things we've observed in economics for a long time.
You are challenging this as though it's my opinion.
I think you, and the points you are pulling from the information—I provided to you, none the less—are seeing this as a binary drive of economic inflation as though "it is" or "it is not", when the whole concept works as, "it is here, it is not here, it is of influence here, it is something else here". i.e. a contributing factor that has scalable influence in a bigger picture.
Also, just because my example of a theory so happened to be a "scientific" theory, you didn't need to go barreling down that path all on your own. I don't see what supplying the definition of scientific theories has to do with anything here, but 👍
You are being incredibly dishonest, given the context.
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When workers demand higher wages from bosses, they are demanding in effect that they realize a greater share of the value generated by their labor, diminishing the share claimed as profit by owners, who contribute no labor toward generating the value they claim.
Bosses may try to recover some of their losses by raising prices, but as long as workers continue to realize a greater share of the wealth they create for society, they are gaining purchasing power.
That's a common argument surrounding worker activities that rings quite hollow because inflation happens because the money supply is being increased or because the money supply is being devalued for some other reason. Higher wages can in theory contribute to inflation but in practice inflation is caused by price increases by vendors. If there were no such price increases we would just see higher wages... and possibly lower profits... which is what we want.
in practice inflation is caused by price increases by vendors
You are literally reversing cause and effect.
Price inflation is prices being increased, and prices are set by vendors. Whatever other changes also may be occurring, raising prices is a choice made by vendors or manufacturers to raise their profits.
Thus, your objection is not broadly meaningful.
When workers have more income, prices may tend to rise as a ramification under our current systems. Workers fight for better wages, however, because employers profit from the labor workers provide, instead of allowing them to realize the full value of their labor. Thus, workers fight for higher wages, and regardless of inflation, continue fighting for higher wages.
Placing blame for inflation on higher income for workers obfuscates broader understanding over the structure of our society.
Anyone concerned with the workers' struggle may have reason to advocate for broader measures to control inflation, but not among them is repressing the fight for higher wages.
All value in society is generated by the labor provided by workers. Support workers, by supporting their struggle to realize the full value of their labor.
From a response I wrote to another commenter:
Inflation refers to the increase in the monetary supply without at least a corresponding increase in the available amount of goods and services. It's this increase (inflation) in the monetary supply that causes the increase (inflation) in prices.
Your are not engaging the substance of the discussion, as much as reiterating explanations you have encountered in other contexts, and which you have not understood adequately to apply more generally.
We can try another approach.
A living wage is an income that supports a particular standard of living considered socially as an acceptable base. Therefore, the nominal value for the living wage at any time will depend on the price of goods.
Even if the price of goods rises, that is, if inflation is occurring, there will always exist some nominal value suitable to be considered the living wage. Anyone who has an income equal to or greater than the value, at some particular moment in time, will have, at the particular moment, a living wage.
The nominal value of the living wage is not fixed, but rather adjusted over time.
Therefore, a living wage and inflation are not incompatible.
No I'm not. Prices for products or services drive inflation. Consumer price index (which inflation is) is literally derived from goods.
But even from a less pedantic point of view and examining the causes for inflation, wages are only a small part of what determines the price for a product. Wages among the people who extract rubber for your tires are extremely low and fixed by the buyers of this rubber. The local buyer then processes it and takes a markup, but the huge price increases is when they in turn need to sell the processed rubber to world corporations and they buy it for extremely cheap and then toss in a huge markup and sell it to the west. The meaningful wages in the product that goes directly to workers might be as low as 10% of the price of the final product.
The ultimate goal here is to costs, and primarily wages so they can extract a maximum amount of surplus value from the workers, and there's nothing in this world that guarantees that workers will be paid a certain percentage or even a reasonable amount. The claim you make is downright laughable because it's so wrong both in practice and theory.
Therefore, the claim that wages are the only drivers for inflation or even the primary driver is a complete lie! We are drained for billions of dollars to the capitalist parasite class every step in the production chain until it's finally distributed. This extraction is so valuable that entire countries can be financed through VAT alone.
It's truly disheartening that there are still people like you roaming around and spreading misinformation and citing neoliberal think tank pseudoscience.
Inflation refers to the increase in the monetary supply without at least a corresponding increase in the available amount of goods and services. It's this increase (inflation) in the monetary supply that causes the increase (inflation) in prices.
That's a basic understanding of inflation that is taught to children in elementary school, but it's not correct as I've explained to you earlier. Also people don't set prices or wages from the money supply for the simple fact that pretty much nobody knows how large money supply is compared to their good or service or what the price of wage should be compared to the money supply.
In fact it's entirely divorced from the money supply which we can see an example of in the rampant price increases of property which haven't followed inflation but rather increased unproportionally fast.