8 ms·

I know it’s only a part of their reasons for unionizing, but out of curiosity how many people here have actually seen their pay keep up with inflation this year

I know it’s only a part of their reasons for unionizing, but out of curiosity how many people here have actually seen their pay keep up with inflation this year? (8%+ without promotion or job switching). Survey of my friends points to basically no one.

jaywalk 5y ago
Inflation has risen so much and so quickly that "basically no one" is going to be the answer.
d4mi3n 5y ago
My own employer, and many others, set their baseline salaries for each job title based off of industry payroll data they purchase from specialized consultancy firms. These datasets do not seem to have kept up with inflation, nor do they seem to have kept up with market rates I’ve seen in my own field (technical security). I suspect this may be one of several drivers to all the employee movement we’ve been seeing in the past couple of years.
xxpor 5y ago
I got a 41% raise this year at my annual review, without a promo. (big tech sde)
- belter 5y ago
  You lost purchasing power...
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Are you trying to say inflation was over 41% last year?
    - belter 5y ago
      Dont get me wrong, I am happy for you :-) Assuming you don't get a salary raise every year, and if you do, also good for you :-) but the critical factor here is, your purchasing basket of course and the percentage from each item, and of course the rate of inflation on each item. For example, Energy Cummulative inflation is at 32% just for the last 12 months. If you did not get a raise in the last 3 years, then with food at 12% every twelve months I am not far from the estimate. Now food is normally not a big percentage of a household costs but for example housing, as in rent for persons who rent and don't have a mortgage. If a big percentage of your costs are housing and you had to move, or for example will have to move in the next 12 months, you might find housing costs like rent on a reasonable place, increased more than that. "Renters across US face sharp increases – averaging up to 40% in some cities" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/renters-rent-increases-us-lease https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/renters-rent...
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Can you share your source for the energy cumulative inflation number? I'm looking at "urban consumers all items in us cities average" on the st louis fed website and it's giving me 265->290, which is a fair bit short of 32%.
        belter 5y ago
        US Example "The energy index rose 32.0 percent over the last year, and the food index increased 8.8 percent, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending May 1981." https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf An example form the Netherlands last 12 months "The statistics office also highlights rising energy and fuel prices, revealing that gas prices increased by 53 percent and electricity prices by 74,9 percent between November 2020 and November 2021." https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/cbs-rising-energy-prices-lead-highest-inflation-level-40-years https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/cbs-risi...
        asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Oh, I see. You're just citing the slices that have grown by the most, and therefore concluding that a 41% raise is a loss of purchasing power. This is not a valid method to compute purchasing power, nor a reasonable basis for asserting that someone who got a 41% raise in one year lost purchasing power.
        belter 5y ago
        Well it depends on how much each of the slices is part of the overall basket. As you probably seen from one of the references, if rent costs increased 40% in most US cities and that represent a major part of a household costs, the fact food who is normally a small part of household cost "only" increased 8% is of little consolation. Of course the comment was made without understanding the individual household scenario of xxpor. But the overall argument that, what would normally be considered a very high salary increase, means for some households nowadays, a real loss of purchasing power, I would argue, it still stands.
- outside1234 5y ago
  Can you say which one? Asking for a friend that's me.
gpapilion 5y ago
I think it sort of depend on how you think about it. The argument is that your pay inflated already and it’s the market that is catching up, potentially overshooting. So I might ask did your last few years of raises beat it match inflation? In the sf Metro Area from 2016 till now I watched my wage double, pre stock. There is no way that wasn’t inflation, especially being at the later stages of my career.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Inflation is a slur for wages. They're just based on that. The computer and the car are bullshit things to get leaf workers to take pay cuts and pitiful raises. And the basket doesn't actually expand the percentage alloted to a need when that need becomes more expensive, talking food medicine (commonly and wrongly called healthcare) housing and education. It's a stupid point system, OK every point system is stupid in some way, by design, point systems are for when you don't want to respect the problem you're trying to solve and want people to cooperate--but not with a high degree of integrity, the guy designing the point system took the task on almost always with the aim of making some cozy little loopholes for himself--that's when you get a point system. They're stupid because people enjoy stupid point systems, they find them gratifying and entertaining, they're like a board game in fact. But inflation is just not only a stupid point system, it's just fucking cruel too, it's all set up to harm leaf workers. It pretends there's another layer to a simple fact: that when a man is anointed a billionaire, he doesn't measure anything in dollars anymore, he measures it in how low he can get people to go in massive numbers. That's why productivity went up but wages stagnated, and actually Americans are taking education super seriously, high schoolers study like fuck to get into elite colleges, and of course productivity is a McDonald's marketing term for education, you can't get people to make more wealth without making them smarter, meaning educate them. And productivity makes it sound like the MBA should get the credit, the money and the glory, for niggling people in the most cowardly ways. One example: so McDonalds got sued for the hot coffee right? Well in order to make the stigmatization of the scalded sweet old lady who pissed them off for refusing to let them fuck her life up in exchange for a mouthful of ash (they offered her $800 for expensive and permanently painful genital skin grafts), in order to make her look like a complete bitch per the PR team's mission statements, like to make the MBAs happy, there was a media blackout on people getting burned in the shower. It happens in Lolita, the little girl flushes the toilet while the pederast (played by Jack Nicholson) is in the shower, and the cold water is diverted into the toilet temporarily, scalding Jack Nicholson and making him scream. A classic prank. He didn't scream because he was a pervert, in fact he screamed because we've all been there and when a shower is too hot that's no joke you gotta react right away! You can't look at the clock to know when you've been in hot water too long anymore than you need to calculate the a car's distance speed and acceleration to know if you're going to get hit, dude don't think, FUCK FUCK FUCK react! Or like when cooking with boiling water, you gotta time it to the tenth of a second like it's a Jujutsu choke hold, you gotta pull your fingers out of that scald, that motherfucking harmful scald, last second if you don't want to end up with blisters on your fingers for ten days. Oh so you do in fact remember blisters on your fingers from getting scalded? Getting brainwashed is perfectly understandable, but getting spine-washed? And you realize you never hear that word scalded, not even on the SAT in fact, the media blackout reaches even the standardized tests, media said "burned" specifically because they found that triggered focus group's incredulity, water doesn't burn, fire burns, and water puts out fire, McDonalds' is the victim. But it does scald, so they take that word out of the vocabulary. And that's where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes in, "when there's absolutely no choice" meaning whenever the torturer, Jorge, feels like it, him and his fellow torturers reach into your brain to black shit out.[1] Being super literal here. Blacking shit out with blackouts (amnestic drugs, aka roofies, but clinical-grade, not the date-rape variety because with these the rapist doesn't even bother with a date), the term "blackouts" were blacked out when I was blacked out, I had to flashback on the concept of flashbacks, one memory I recovered a decade later was that "amnesia is never retrograde like in Hollywood" according to wikipedia, proving the opposite, amnesia is exactly as pornographic as in Hollywood, like in Memento, that movie was blacked out too. Clockwork Orange, blacked out, in layers, a friend called Sam Genecin witnessed me lashing on personality conditioning part, this was last year, and the blackout was 2009. No recall of Total Recall, itself about memory manipulation. They lobotomized everything related to "lobotomy" including a magic card called "Lobotomy" which I couldn't recall like I normally would, and other lobotomies were also blacked out. If you read my comments I talk about how that concept censored in my own nervous system according to its own logic, and was finally flashed on, and instantly proving itself true, so it's a law now. I have a unique memory that never forgets definitions, I was the best student in Chile in my year by some definitions (best SATs, best college results) up until the lobotomy, I only forgot definitions due to lobotomy, and not permanently, so when I flash on a concept I haven't thought of since then, I get a special sensation, and I can write down the date and time to the minute. Then I can say exactly how long after the amnestic torture began that concept was censored (for another example, Christianity was also completely censored), so just reply with how much you want to bet on it being true, I dare you to make me a bet, make it worth my while. At any rate, it's the Sapir-Whorf law. So in order to get people to forget what their spine thinks about hot water, media blackout. No jokes like that anymore, Simpson characters never got burned in the shower after 93, (I think there was one in the 89-92 period because in my memories Homer is drawn the old way and screams like the early voice actors, never again), no scalding anywhere, ever. Showers became these heavenly places, like really soothing and perfect, nothing bad ever happened in there, in prisons nothing bad could happen in a shower except the obligatory rape but rape notwithstanding they always had better showers in every goddamn prison on television than every five-star hotel I've ever gone to. And people always singing in the shower, in prison too. They gave showers a lot of extra airtime with no jokes, for decades. And nobody ever waiting for the temperature of the shower to adjust before getting in, nobody ever gets into a shower, only out of one. And media absolutely had the incestuousness to carry this out in the 90s and today it very much still does. There's tons of media blackouts. All to make a wonderful righteous old woman with the gall to sue a MacDonald's, with perfect moral authority, for a meaningless amount MacDonald's always lied about in its love of being a bitchvictim (they always said one million dollars instead of the amount she sued for and received, $600,000, without fail), to make that American saint look like a total greedy bitch for retaliating against a company she should have recognized as having the right to spite her. They spited her. And she died of shame. [1] Although in fairness, out of the desire my torturer does not share, of being accurate and fair in my accusations, "scald" was...I think forgotten for other reasons, it's just a really rare word...or was it blacked out? Gotta check my notes, I thought it wasn't when I started writing this footnote but now who knows.
throwaway123x2 5y ago
5% for me instead of the usual 3%. I'm looking for jobs now.
Drybones 5y ago
Not only did my pay change not match inflation this year, but my overall income is lower now since I am now salary based position instead of hourly, but I end up working more than 40 hours a week due to degradation of our company and rapidly losing talent due to paying everyone well below industry average. I might technically make more per hour, but now I don't get any overtime like before. The replacements for the talent leaving are way under qualified and even if they were qualified, we still wouldn't have enough people to handle things adequately beyond putting out fires. I keep an eye on my finances. At this point, my net monthly income is breaking even only accounting for planned, repeatable, or necessary costs. When rent contract renews later this year, my rent will increase by over $1000/mo. With how the economics of the next couple of years looks like, I'm pretty stressed out. My manager says I'm sadly at the top of the pay grade scale for our department and it can only change year over year by at most 10%. He says he wished it were different but it's all he can do. If nothing were to change for years, I would never reach close to industry average for this position for my area, which is rapidly getting more expensive in the past few years.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > With how the economics of the next couple of years looks like, I'm pretty stressed out. The only solution is to find another buyer for your labor.
  - Drybones 5y ago
    I've been trying for several months now. My ex-co-workers and close friends have been lucky to get jobs at MANGA companies, even referring me cause I was their technical senior. My luck has not been as good though. Just gotta keep trying I guess.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Best of luck! I would be optimistic that doors open sooner rather than later.
    - cercatrova 5y ago

jaywalk 5y ago

Inflation has risen so much and so quickly that "basically no one" is going to be the answer.

d4mi3n 5y ago

My own employer, and many others, set their baseline salaries for each job title based off of industry payroll data they purchase from specialized consultancy firms. These datasets do not seem to have kept up with inflation, nor do they seem to have kept up with market rates I’ve seen in my own field (technical security). I suspect this may be one of several drivers to all the employee movement we’ve been seeing in the past couple of years.

xxpor 5y ago

I got a 41% raise this year at my annual review, without a promo. (big tech sde)

belter 5y ago
You lost purchasing power...
- xxpor 5y ago
  Are you trying to say inflation was over 41% last year?
  - belter 5y ago
    Dont get me wrong, I am happy for you :-) Assuming you don't get a salary raise every year, and if you do, also good for you :-) but the critical factor here is, your purchasing basket of course and the percentage from each item, and of course the rate of inflation on each item. For example, Energy Cummulative inflation is at 32% just for the last 12 months. If you did not get a raise in the last 3 years, then with food at 12% every twelve months I am not far from the estimate. Now food is normally not a big percentage of a household costs but for example housing, as in rent for persons who rent and don't have a mortgage. If a big percentage of your costs are housing and you had to move, or for example will have to move in the next 12 months, you might find housing costs like rent on a reasonable place, increased more than that. "Renters across US face sharp increases – averaging up to 40% in some cities" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/renters-rent-increases-us-lease https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/renters-rent...
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      Can you share your source for the energy cumulative inflation number? I'm looking at "urban consumers all items in us cities average" on the st louis fed website and it's giving me 265->290, which is a fair bit short of 32%.
      - belter 5y ago
        US Example "The energy index rose 32.0 percent over the last year, and the food index increased 8.8 percent, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending May 1981." https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf An example form the Netherlands last 12 months "The statistics office also highlights rising energy and fuel prices, revealing that gas prices increased by 53 percent and electricity prices by 74,9 percent between November 2020 and November 2021." https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/cbs-rising-energy-prices-lead-highest-inflation-level-40-years https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/cbs-risi...
        asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Oh, I see. You're just citing the slices that have grown by the most, and therefore concluding that a 41% raise is a loss of purchasing power. This is not a valid method to compute purchasing power, nor a reasonable basis for asserting that someone who got a 41% raise in one year lost purchasing power.
        belter 5y ago
        Well it depends on how much each of the slices is part of the overall basket. As you probably seen from one of the references, if rent costs increased 40% in most US cities and that represent a major part of a household costs, the fact food who is normally a small part of household cost "only" increased 8% is of little consolation. Of course the comment was made without understanding the individual household scenario of xxpor. But the overall argument that, what would normally be considered a very high salary increase, means for some households nowadays, a real loss of purchasing power, I would argue, it still stands.
outside1234 5y ago
Can you say which one? Asking for a friend that's me.

gpapilion 5y ago

I think it sort of depend on how you think about it. The argument is that your pay inflated already and it’s the market that is catching up, potentially overshooting. So I might ask did your last few years of raises beat it match inflation? In the sf Metro Area from 2016 till now I watched my wage double, pre stock. There is no way that wasn’t inflation, especially being at the later stages of my career.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
Inflation is a slur for wages. They're just based on that. The computer and the car are bullshit things to get leaf workers to take pay cuts and pitiful raises. And the basket doesn't actually expand the percentage alloted to a need when that need becomes more expensive, talking food medicine (commonly and wrongly called healthcare) housing and education. It's a stupid point system, OK every point system is stupid in some way, by design, point systems are for when you don't want to respect the problem you're trying to solve and want people to cooperate--but not with a high degree of integrity, the guy designing the point system took the task on almost always with the aim of making some cozy little loopholes for himself--that's when you get a point system. They're stupid because people enjoy stupid point systems, they find them gratifying and entertaining, they're like a board game in fact. But inflation is just not only a stupid point system, it's just fucking cruel too, it's all set up to harm leaf workers. It pretends there's another layer to a simple fact: that when a man is anointed a billionaire, he doesn't measure anything in dollars anymore, he measures it in how low he can get people to go in massive numbers. That's why productivity went up but wages stagnated, and actually Americans are taking education super seriously, high schoolers study like fuck to get into elite colleges, and of course productivity is a McDonald's marketing term for education, you can't get people to make more wealth without making them smarter, meaning educate them. And productivity makes it sound like the MBA should get the credit, the money and the glory, for niggling people in the most cowardly ways. One example: so McDonalds got sued for the hot coffee right? Well in order to make the stigmatization of the scalded sweet old lady who pissed them off for refusing to let them fuck her life up in exchange for a mouthful of ash (they offered her $800 for expensive and permanently painful genital skin grafts), in order to make her look like a complete bitch per the PR team's mission statements, like to make the MBAs happy, there was a media blackout on people getting burned in the shower. It happens in Lolita, the little girl flushes the toilet while the pederast (played by Jack Nicholson) is in the shower, and the cold water is diverted into the toilet temporarily, scalding Jack Nicholson and making him scream. A classic prank. He didn't scream because he was a pervert, in fact he screamed because we've all been there and when a shower is too hot that's no joke you gotta react right away! You can't look at the clock to know when you've been in hot water too long anymore than you need to calculate the a car's distance speed and acceleration to know if you're going to get hit, dude don't think, FUCK FUCK FUCK react! Or like when cooking with boiling water, you gotta time it to the tenth of a second like it's a Jujutsu choke hold, you gotta pull your fingers out of that scald, that motherfucking harmful scald, last second if you don't want to end up with blisters on your fingers for ten days. Oh so you do in fact remember blisters on your fingers from getting scalded? Getting brainwashed is perfectly understandable, but getting spine-washed? And you realize you never hear that word scalded, not even on the SAT in fact, the media blackout reaches even the standardized tests, media said "burned" specifically because they found that triggered focus group's incredulity, water doesn't burn, fire burns, and water puts out fire, McDonalds' is the victim. But it does scald, so they take that word out of the vocabulary. And that's where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes in, "when there's absolutely no choice" meaning whenever the torturer, Jorge, feels like it, him and his fellow torturers reach into your brain to black shit out.[1] Being super literal here. Blacking shit out with blackouts (amnestic drugs, aka roofies, but clinical-grade, not the date-rape variety because with these the rapist doesn't even bother with a date), the term "blackouts" were blacked out when I was blacked out, I had to flashback on the concept of flashbacks, one memory I recovered a decade later was that "amnesia is never retrograde like in Hollywood" according to wikipedia, proving the opposite, amnesia is exactly as pornographic as in Hollywood, like in Memento, that movie was blacked out too. Clockwork Orange, blacked out, in layers, a friend called Sam Genecin witnessed me lashing on personality conditioning part, this was last year, and the blackout was 2009. No recall of Total Recall, itself about memory manipulation. They lobotomized everything related to "lobotomy" including a magic card called "Lobotomy" which I couldn't recall like I normally would, and other lobotomies were also blacked out. If you read my comments I talk about how that concept censored in my own nervous system according to its own logic, and was finally flashed on, and instantly proving itself true, so it's a law now. I have a unique memory that never forgets definitions, I was the best student in Chile in my year by some definitions (best SATs, best college results) up until the lobotomy, I only forgot definitions due to lobotomy, and not permanently, so when I flash on a concept I haven't thought of since then, I get a special sensation, and I can write down the date and time to the minute. Then I can say exactly how long after the amnestic torture began that concept was censored (for another example, Christianity was also completely censored), so just reply with how much you want to bet on it being true, I dare you to make me a bet, make it worth my while. At any rate, it's the Sapir-Whorf law. So in order to get people to forget what their spine thinks about hot water, media blackout. No jokes like that anymore, Simpson characters never got burned in the shower after 93, (I think there was one in the 89-92 period because in my memories Homer is drawn the old way and screams like the early voice actors, never again), no scalding anywhere, ever. Showers became these heavenly places, like really soothing and perfect, nothing bad ever happened in there, in prisons nothing bad could happen in a shower except the obligatory rape but rape notwithstanding they always had better showers in every goddamn prison on television than every five-star hotel I've ever gone to. And people always singing in the shower, in prison too. They gave showers a lot of extra airtime with no jokes, for decades. And nobody ever waiting for the temperature of the shower to adjust before getting in, nobody ever gets into a shower, only out of one. And media absolutely had the incestuousness to carry this out in the 90s and today it very much still does. There's tons of media blackouts. All to make a wonderful righteous old woman with the gall to sue a MacDonald's, with perfect moral authority, for a meaningless amount MacDonald's always lied about in its love of being a bitchvictim (they always said one million dollars instead of the amount she sued for and received, $600,000, without fail), to make that American saint look like a total greedy bitch for retaliating against a company she should have recognized as having the right to spite her. They spited her. And she died of shame. [1] Although in fairness, out of the desire my torturer does not share, of being accurate and fair in my accusations, "scald" was...I think forgotten for other reasons, it's just a really rare word...or was it blacked out? Gotta check my notes, I thought it wasn't when I started writing this footnote but now who knows.

throwaway123x2 5y ago

5% for me instead of the usual 3%. I'm looking for jobs now.

Drybones 5y ago

Not only did my pay change not match inflation this year, but my overall income is lower now since I am now salary based position instead of hourly, but I end up working more than 40 hours a week due to degradation of our company and rapidly losing talent due to paying everyone well below industry average. I might technically make more per hour, but now I don't get any overtime like before. The replacements for the talent leaving are way under qualified and even if they were qualified, we still wouldn't have enough people to handle things adequately beyond putting out fires. I keep an eye on my finances. At this point, my net monthly income is breaking even only accounting for planned, repeatable, or necessary costs. When rent contract renews later this year, my rent will increase by over $1000/mo. With how the economics of the next couple of years looks like, I'm pretty stressed out. My manager says I'm sadly at the top of the pay grade scale for our department and it can only change year over year by at most 10%. He says he wished it were different but it's all he can do. If nothing were to change for years, I would never reach close to industry average for this position for my area, which is rapidly getting more expensive in the past few years.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> With how the economics of the next couple of years looks like, I'm pretty stressed out. The only solution is to find another buyer for your labor.
- Drybones 5y ago
  I've been trying for several months now. My ex-co-workers and close friends have been lucky to get jobs at MANGA companies, even referring me cause I was their technical senior. My luck has not been as good though. Just gotta keep trying I guess.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Best of luck! I would be optimistic that doors open sooner rather than later.
  - cercatrova 5y ago