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American workers are demanding almost $80k a year to take a new job

• epicureanideal 3y ago
  So they’re asking for their wages to roughly keep pace with inflation, and maybe get slightly ahead of inflation, knowing their raises after they accept the job may be below inflation? Seems reasonable to me. Workers want to be able to live as well as they did last year. I’m shocked.
  • EMM_386 3y ago
    That's what I took away from this. I'm not sure I really see anything interesting here, except this: > The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation Rising wages aren't the driving forces of inflation. The problem is exactly the opposite it seems. The Federal Reserve and "easy money" policies put a lot of money into the system trying to deal with the pandemic. The fallout of that is inflation. The fallout of THAT is people need more money to get by. Not just to deal with the inflation, but to deal with raising interest rates and everything else that comes along with trying to "fix" that issue. So people demand higher wages.
  • WalterBright 3y ago
    Somebody's got to pay for all that extra money Biden has been printing. Nothing is free. Inflation is how we pay the bill.
    • throwaway5959 3y ago
      Could pay for government spending with taxes.
      • WalterBright 3y ago
        Yes, and if that was done, there'd be no inflation. Of course, then people would be aware of those huge costly tax increases, and the government would be unable to shift the blame.
        • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
          We could cut spending on our massively bloated military and stop with the tax cuts for rich. Republicans are hardly fiscally conservative these days, we have a choice between the “tax and spend” party and the “spend and cut taxes” party. A lot of our problems simply come from low interest rates, and our inability to raise them as the economy got better; now we are stuck with raising interest rates because we basically broke the lever. Both parties are at fault here, I guess we are just getting what we asked for.
    • greenhearth 3y ago
      All of the world economically viable nations have been printing more money after the recession of the 2000s, not just "Biden." Increased liquidity has incidental effects on inflation, which comes from different factors, like resource scarcity, tariff increases and price gouging.
      • WalterBright 3y ago
        You're right that all countries switched from the gold standard to fiat money so they could inflate it, and inflate it they did. What Biden did recently, however, was a truly massive spike in deficit spending, thus spiking inflation a few months later.
        • greenhearth 3y ago
          No, they brought down inflation rate, which spiked after the pandemic and increase of international tariffs. But maybe you are the type blinded by political outrage
          • WalterBright 3y ago
            You might want to look at a chart of deficit spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD What do you think a $3,200,000,000,000 deficit in just one year might mean to the economy? Do you see the part where the deficit dropped to $1,300,000,000,000 and "they brought down the inflation part"?
            • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
              Your chart shoes deficit spending going down since Biden took office (lower means more negative). The -$3,200,000,000,000 deficit number you quote happened in 2020, Biden was sworn in in 2021. I’m not clear about the point you are trying to make.
        • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
          Deficit spending has actually been falling under Biden when compared to Trump. But of course, that comes from a huge spike at the end of the Trump administration (the same situation for Obama after Bush).
    • argentinian 3y ago
      For Argentinian citizens what you say is common sense, backed by the experience of living with inflation for more than 50 years. For a liberal HN reader living in an expensive apartment in SF, what you say is a cause for downvotes.
      • WalterBright 3y ago
        I know. But I don't care about karma points, and so feel free to speak the truth.
• mydriasis 3y ago
  According to "in 2013 dollars" [0], $80,000 today is worth roughly $68,000 in 2020 dollars. Inflation is kicking everyone's ass. If you haven't gotten a significant raise in the last couple years, you've probably taken a rather large pay cut. [0] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2020?amount=68000 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2020?amount=68000
  • danielvaughn 3y ago
    My salary is $25k higher than it was in 2021 and I have less disposable income than I did back then. It's insane.
    • mydriasis 3y ago
      I hear you. It's tough out there, getting tougher all the time. Fingers crossed that the rate-racking the fed is doing helps slow it down a bit. I talk to my family about it all the time -- we're very lucky where we're at. We wonder how many people are managing to keep food on the table with these prices and the inability of wages to keep up. My mom works at a donation center focused on veterans, and they give out food several weekends out of the month. They're breaking records for visitors every month now.
      • landemva 3y ago
        > Fingers crossed that the rate-racking the fed is doing helps slow it down a bit. Along with finger crossing and hoping, we could look for causes of price increases, and then force the politicians to end the inflation-inducing military conflict in eastern Europe.
        • ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
          If this inflation is the price of liberty for Ukrainians and the price of independence from a dictator for Western Europe, then I am willing to pay that, personally. I just don't think Ukraine explains that much beyond natural gas prices going up, as far as I'm aware, and even that I suspect is limited to Europe. (I am in the US).
• dexwiz 3y ago
  I love that a key point is that this drives inflation, instead of crazy inflation forcing people to look for higher paying jobs. /s
  • Supermancho 3y ago
    Wages have been a lagging indicator for almost 50 years now. Anyone who portends that wages drive inflation is not worth listening to. Wages have not kept up, today, nor will they tomorrow.
    • sokoloff 3y ago
      Wages have somewhat more than kept up with inflation. 1955-2017: https://www.statista.com/chart/18418/real-mean-and-median-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18418/real-mean-and-median-fa... 1984-2021: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N (I couldn't find a single series that ran 1950s through 2021/2022, so had to use two above.)
      • IanKerr 3y ago
        Those charts show wages growing at an annualized rate of 1.5% at best. Any years with inflation greater than 1.5% were effectively years of wage LOSS, rather than growth. Most of those years had inflation greater than 1.5%. Edit: this math is bad, see sokoloff's comment below.
        • Supermancho 3y ago
          QED
        • wizofaus 3y ago
          Doesn't the "adjusted dollars" mean the numbers are already adjusted for inflation? Pretty sure the median wage in 1984 was a lot less than 56K in 1984 dollars.
        • sokoloff 3y ago
• RugnirViking 3y ago
  According to the article's ending it's likely more complicated than just "wages going up". It mentions that "Job seekers, or those who have looked for work in the previous four weeks, declined to 19.4% from 24.7% a year ago. That came as job openings fell by 738,000 to 9.58 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The likelihood of switching jobs fell, dropping to 10.6% from 11% a year ago, while expectations of being offered a new job also declined, to 18.7% from 21.1%." If less people are willing and/or able to switch jobs, meaning there is less supply of labor, is it any surprise wages rise?
• wincy 3y ago
  “Highest level ever…” since 2014 is such weasel words. What did wage inflation look like in the 1980s? It’s also weird because the article seems to posture that wanting a higher wage for yourself contributes to inflation, but it’s the most reasonable thing in the world. If the news media reports that there’s inflation, people demand higher wages to account for inflation, and inflation increases.
• nine_zeros 3y ago
  There be another article titled "Landlords are demanding 20% more a year than two years ago" and that would explain a large portion of the American economy wonkiness.
  • datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Yeah. Friend of mine has had her rent go up 25% over the last two years in DC.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • ldhough 3y ago
      I live in DC, it is ridiculously expensive but rent increases are capped, google says the formula is CPI + 2% but no more than 10%/yr. If she stayed in the same unit she might want to make sure her landlord isn't raising her rent illegally.
  • ptyyy 3y ago
    Yeah, my in-laws rent went up nearly 40% and the property management claimed it was due to upgrades (the upgrade was a new coat of paint on the building). That took them out of the range of being able to afford their apartment and other necessities with social security and a meager retirement. They had to move to a new place in a bad area and my MIL had to start working again.
  • at_compile_time 3y ago
    Economic growth raises property values, speculators pile on hoping to make money for nothing, property values rocket upward taking rents with them, rents exceed their productive value, businesses close and people leave because the rent is too damn high, and recession ensues. Expect property owners to hang on as long as they can. Henry George laid this out 144 years ago in Progress and Poverty. Once you've seen it, you can't un-see it.
• mistrial9 3y ago
  context? forty years of "illegal" Latino laborers, thirty years of dramatically rising CEO pay, now the outrage after firing 100,000 tech workers. seems like "submarine journalism" here edit
• Guvante 3y ago
  > While goods prices have abated since pushing overall inflation to its highest level in more than 40 years in mid-2022, other factors continue to keep it well above the Fed’s targeted rate of 2%. The linked article is more explicit. Shelter costs are a huge factor in why inflation hasn't settled down. This isn't explicit because this article plays the "if people accepted lower wages inflation would be lower" idea which doesn't apply to shelter costs like it does to luxury goods. When the primary driver of inflation is housing the supply demand side of the equation is only the solution if you accept that forcing people to be homeless while employed is an acceptable way to reduce demand and thus prices.
  • landemva 3y ago
    > When the primary driver of inflation is housing I thought price increases were being driven by fiat money printing, sending pallets of that money to Ukraine, and high energy prices due to that conflict.
    • hnbad 3y ago
      The US economy is hardly as isolationist as you seem to think. Do you have any idea what the embargo on Russia did to the EU economy (hint: we didn't build those massive pipelines because we liked looking at them)? Let alone the massive loss of productivity in Ukraine, which had a relatively high level of education compared with other Eastern European countries while having very low wages? Not to mention the hit to world food supplies (which of course has less of a direct impact on the Global North as most of the food produced in Ukraine goes to the Global South). And this is while we're still in a global pandemic that was still causing occasional lockdowns and shutdowns in China by the end of last year, causing ripples through global supply chains. Plus the short outage from the accidental blockade of the Suez Canal and the lasting effects from the 2020 disruptions of supply chains and mass death of small businesses. Not to forget the increase (and increase in severity) in droughts and floodings and wildfires and other natural disasters which have also been messing with production and supply (e.g. I know of several major insurance companies in Germany that are currently completely backlogged over claims relating to recent severe weather incidents). There's a global ongoing financial crisis and it's neither concentrated in nor entirely caused by the United States. Yes, individual incidents (e.g. the SV Bank failure) have global knock-on effects but this cuts both ways. EDIT: I don't fundamentally disagree with you. I just want to point out that energy prices aren't the entirety of what's fueling the ongoing situation and that it's a bit bigger than just the invasion of Ukraine, which is already disruptive enough (after all this is why we didn't have any major land wars in Europe since WW2 excluding the fallout from the fall of the Soviet Union).
• adamwong246 3y ago
  American orphan waifs are DEMANDING another bowl of porridge.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• donmcronald 3y ago
  > The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation. The wealthy are buying up all the tangible assets and price gouging everyone with high rent and subscriptions for everything imaginable, but it’s the workers asking for enough money to keep up that’s driving inflation. Ok. The western world has gone from single income homeowners in the 80s to dual income homeowners today. That’s 80 hours of work per household per week instead of 40. IMO we’re trending towards multigenerational home ownership where it may require 4-6 income earners to own a house. We’ll all be living paycheck-to-paycheck with 3 families to a house and the economists will still be blaming inflation on the working class having too much money. Maybe it’s time to start asking if a lack of competition is allowing the ownership class to manipulate supply so they can set unfair prices.
  • birdyrooster 3y ago
    We need anti-trust, break up these companies into smaller competitors and give workers a chance to buy into the American dream again.
    • hnhmp 3y ago
      While I don't disagree with the notion of breaking up big companies, a have a small bone to pick about the last thing you said. The American dream was never intended to apply to more than a very specific subset of the population; those that we see with the majority of wealth today. It's already worked for those it was meant to work for, and consequently it will never be fought for again. At least, not by those with any real power today; they got what they wanted and have been pulling up the ladder on everyone else ever since. Let's quit trying to buy into the American dream, and try buy into a just and fair society for all. If only that were the goal all along :/
      • birdyrooster 3y ago
        The American Dream to me is a just and fair society for all and I see equitable (as is feasible) ownership of the means of production as being foundational. We need everyone to be cut back into the deal somehow and anti-trust is one way to do that. I think we are looking for the same things.
• camgunz 3y ago
  "Employers have been trying to keep pace with the wage demands" There's no evidence for this characterization in the piece. The average FTE offer is $69,475, the average reservation salary is $78,645. Everything else here is either inference to paint employers as nobly struggling against the tide of unfairly high demands ("$80k a year?? The gall!") and blaming it for inflation. So tired of this stuff that's just blaming labor for everything, from empty downtowns (maybe don't build commercial districts an hour's walk from any residential districts) to inflation (let's give taxing corporate windfalls a shot). The election cycle is so tedious.
  • Clent 3y ago
    Very Orwellian. There is no evidence that employers have been trying to keep pace. There is ample evidence that they have tried to suppress wages. For decades what they are calling 'keeping pace' has been performed by knocking the legs out of their employees.
    • hnbad 3y ago
      Wage suppression is directly rewarded by the way the system is set up because it reduces expenses and thus increases profits. The same goes for layoffs (short-term at least) and erosion of workers' rights. To expect a business to not engage in it is optimistic, to expect it to act in the opposite direction is delusional. Yes, there are individual entrepreneurs who try to be "the good guys". But they're operating at a competive disadvantage and usually can only afford to do so for a limited time due to e.g. strong initial funding. If you want corporations to behave this way you don't want corporations, you want co-operatives where all workers are also owners of the company because this completely removes the dynamics caused by the conflict between the interests of the shareholders/owners and those of the employees/workers by turning both into the same group. I think it's a perfectly legitimate political opinion to think that business owners should be allowed to roam freely and pursue profit over worker well-being, but I'd expect people who hold this opinion to at least be honest about it and not pretend employers are altruistic humanitarians.
      • 3y ago
• maxehmookau 3y ago
  "American workers are demanding the market pays them the market rate for their labor" FTFY.
• grej 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230821151454/https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/21/american-workers-are-demanding-almost-80000-a-year-to-take-a-new-job.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230821151454/https://www.cnbc....
• jedberg 3y ago
  > The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation. They have their causality backwards for this one. It's already been shown (repeatedly) that the cause of inflation in the last few years has been primarily driven by increased corporate profits, meaning prices are going up. People just want enough money to afford inflation.
• a2xd94 3y ago
  Idea : the executives who paid for this article could instead choose to organically grow profits instead of using the cover-up of 'inflation' to price gouge and put money in their own pockets, instead of blaming the folks who are making the profits for the company.
• WalterBright 3y ago
  > wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation. This is called the "wage-price" spiral. It is not the cause of inflation. Inflation is caused by the government diluting the value of money by printing lots and lots of extra money.
  • hnbad 3y ago
    [citation needed] MMT would disagree with this claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory Even among Keynesian economists and others the exact causes are disputed and most seem to agree that it comes down to a combination of factors with "making more money" not necessarily even being the most direct or biggest contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation Opponents often cite historical examples of hyperinflation but arguably in most of those cases the government "making excessive amounts of money" was just a reaction to the hyperinflation itself. E.g. the collapse of the German "Papiermark" directly followed the defeat of Germany in the first World War, which also settled the country with extremely painful reparations and involved a republican revolution which preceded years of political instability (e.g. there were two different and conflicting Soviet republics in Bavaria alone). So as correlation goes, states that go kerplunk tend to print a lot of money. This does not suggest that printing a lot of money makes them go kerplunk or vice versa. They might be going kerplunk for entirely different reasons and print a lot of money to address those reasons, desperately. It actually seems unscientific to assume societies work so trivially that printing too much money destroys them given how complex we know societies are (or failing that, at least how complex individual humans are and how complex therefore interactions between them must be).
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      Oh, there are lots of explanations for inflation, usually one party or another raised prices (those bastards!). Consider you have $100. You buy 10 items at $10 each. Now the running dog capitalist swine raises the price to $11. You now can buy only 9 items. Money doesn't appear in your pocket to cover the price increase, so simply fewer items get bought. That's what's wrong with all those other inflation theories. But with the increase in money supply theory, the extra money dilutes the value of the existing money, and money does appear in your pocket as you get an inflation raise. This would not be possible without the creation of more money.
• breadbreadbread 3y ago
  Rent Control Now
• tb_technical 3y ago
  Yeah man, it's almost like the poors want to be able to afford a house, a car, and the ability to reproduce. How dare they! /s
• throwaway5959 3y ago
  All you need to see is that the domain for the article is CNBC to know that it’s anti-worker bullshit.
• spraveenitpro 3y ago
  [dead]
• rank0 3y ago
  Wages are just the price of labor. Our currency is worth less, so employees are demanding more in dollar terms for their labor. I feel like people misunderstand/misrepresent what the fed officials say about the relationship between wages and inflation. The Fed doesn’t want to create unemployment or directly reduce wages. The ideal scenario is to curb inflation while keeping unemployment as low as possible (which is at a record low atm). Raising rates restricts the supply of credit, which makes servicing debt more difficult and usually results in layoffs. It’s not like the Fed is conspiring to keep the working class poor from a smokey back room…which I feel has become the narrative being pushed by media outlets nowadays.
• hey_now 3y ago
  Normal mind: Money printing is to be blamed for inflation. Also women working. Higher mind: MMT is to be blamed for inflation. Also there will be a cool down period (that will help exactly no one). Megamind: Some no-name village bombing in buttfuck nowhere Ukraine is responsible across the board for all global inflation and perfectly explains why average house prices have gone up past a million dollars.
• jscipione 3y ago
  So much for the idea that income levels would rise with inflation. Democrats have made us all poorer, treat them accordingly.
• moneycantbuy 3y ago
  in much of california $80k/yr is poverty wages. everyone is getting squeezed tighter. no time or space for family/community. and for what? so your favorite billionaire can try to escape the planet
• dzonga 3y ago
  unless the gvt steps - in situations like these the invincible hand of the market isn't gonna work its magic. for things that involve capital - the leisure class / owning class always has an advantage. and btw - if you can't quit your job today and not work again for the next 10 years - while maintaining the same standard of living. you're part of the working class not leisure class. no matter how high your income is.
• distract8901 3y ago
  > The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation. Honestly shocked that anyone actually believes this nonsense. Demand for wages is up because the price of not dying is up. Rent is skyrocketing, food is more expensive, literally every aspect of life is now a subscription or some other nickel-and-dime scheme. I won't even talk about the current state of medical billing. But also, the premise just doesn't make any sense. How can higher wages cause inflation -at all-? Money isn't being printed to cover these wages, the money is transferred from employer to employee. No part of that is inflationary. No extra money is being created, the value of the dollar is not reduced. If you want to insist that higher wages cause inflation, you must also accept that CEO wages and corporate profits are causing a proportional amount of inflation. Or maybe siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars out of the US economy to be hoarded forever in offshore bank accounts is having an effect on the value of the dollar? Nah, it's definitely 20-something's buying $12 store-brand eggs and paying $8,000/mo rent on a studio flat.
  • hnfong 3y ago
    > siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars out of the US economy to be hoarded forever in offshore bank accounts is having an effect on the value of the dollar? It's really hard for individuals or even corporations to "hoard" cash forever in offshore bank accounts and cause inflation (nor deflation). The money isn't locked in vault (not physical, nor electronically). They generally end up right back into the market because those banks offers loans for a good chunk of their deposits. Or they buy bonds or MBS which are effectively the same thing. Same for parking assets in a financial institution. Whatever assets you buy the original sellers gets the money you put in, and they use it on something else. The only real way you could personally take money out of circulation is to withdraw physical cash and burn it (Inadvisable, in some places this is illegal) or bury it in the ground.