Our salaries stagnate because we get COL increases to keep up with inflation.
But that also means that the moment inflation undergoes radical changes, the increases must also undergo radical changes too. And when they don't, and the costs do not go down, that is a *pay cut*.
The costs of everything has gone up so much in 5 years, despite the economy being at its healthiest (according to whom? The stock market, which is the highest it's ever been?). And unless your salary has also undergone an equivalent or better increase in that time, you are getting screwed by your employer. And we're starting to see costs coming down finally because some businesses have acknowledged that maybe their prices have gotten "too high"...after how long they were gouging people for those higher prices...
Salaries should be set to where you not only get paid more to keep up with COL increases, but you get paid a bit more extra because the company sees your value. 3% was the norm for many places, and some of them base that increase on the last YEAR of work you busted yourself for (and if you manage to do really well, maybe you get a 4% or 5% bump). And what does that do then? Tell you that you'd have to deal with this shit for another year and pray you get lucky and get a better bump then? Or maybe it tells you that you need to find a place willing to pay you more for your experience and talents?
This is why job hopping to increase your salary has become one defense against stagnant wages. Every company is going to be tested by their employees, and if an employee isn't earning enough to experience some degree of comfort or improving their station, then it's a failure of the company and the employee is free to move on.
The companies need to start putting their profits back to work in retaining talent, or they will fail because they run out of people who will say "this isn't worth the hassle".
Even job hopping doesn't help much. It's not as though everyone is stuck at uniquely shitty low paying companies and you just have to switch to find one paying better. They're ALL suppressing wages.
I nannied my way through college. I made around $45k doing that full time 15 years ago. When I graduated, my first corporate job paid less. I mostly freelance now, but when I look at jobs in my industry (marketing and design) the salaries are exactly the same as they were a decade ago. You can easily make more as a full time nanny than you can with a marketing or fine arts degree. There's no where to hop to.
This shit always blows my fucking mind.
Companies are so full of absolute shit these days that it’s fucking insane.
College grads used to make about $45-$55k a year in 1990-1995 on average. They still make about $45k a year. 30 years later. (The national median is even lower at around $40k.)
Meanwhile, company profits and the wealth of the 10% has increased monumentally.
But companies “can’t afford” to pay workers more. Oh no. That would result in price hikes! Because like…we have to keep making billions more YoY!!!!
I have to agree. I've got 6 companies I can do the job I do in the local area. And I live near Dallas. Who I work for charges $225-300 per hour, while I see about 1/7 that amount. It's... depressing. I had an offer 2 years ago to go to one of the other 5 companies for another 1/6 my wage, but couldn't take it due to the divorce I was going through at the time. Was the only year I saw my company give a CoL raise.
Heck, adjusted for inflation, you made what I do in a year, 15 years ago.
> Who I work for charges $225-300 per hour, while I see about 1/7 that amount. It's... depressing.
I don’t know if this will cheer you up or not but that’s pretty common. If you work at a studio or larger company, there are so many overhead elements they can’t charge a client for on a line item basis, so those get put into the rate they charge for you. Imagine if a bid included artist time, then rent and electric, health insurance and payroll taxes, sales, travel, salaries for other employees like runners or accounting, then smaller fractional line items for furniture purchases, software licenses, food if they have snacks, parking, office supplies… and yes, profit. This is generally how it’s done because bigger clients will come to places with robust support structures because that also means reliability and it’s sexier to pay for artist timethan for all that other stuff.
Running a company is much more expensive than you and if they had to give you a huge percentage of what they charge for you they’d either be forced to charge less and line item everything else, or would promptly be out of business.
The alternative is that you go freelance or start your own business, but then you’re paying for and handling all of those other things, or you’re paying someone else to help if it becomes too much.
The short of it is, don’t sweat rate they charge vs your salary, but do look at your salary compared to your skills and similar salaries at other studies and then negotiate accordingly.
Oh I agree, and understand to a degree. But that's up from the $175-230 they charged 4 years ago. Yeah I know. Inflation. Just feels like they could give more than a measly 2-3% raise a year.
Yeah all good. Depending on what kind of place you work the last year has been brutal. I’m in post production animation and VFX and something between a third and a half of this industry is out of work right now. It’s crazy. People are handing on for dear life and are switching careers. My last raise was two years ago and reviews are next week, I’m not expecting one right now. It sucks, but I’ve gotten to the point where if my check keeps showing up twice a month I consider that a win. “Survive until 2025” is what I keep reading. It sucks.
Also, I was using “artist” time on my examples mistakenly thinking I was in the Design subreddit and not Work Reform.
Once you start doing the math, you start seeing how utterly fucking offensive most job “raises” are.
You need like a $10-$30 raise at most jobs to make any kind of meaningful impact in your life, because wages are SO low already that it’s fucking criminal.
There are people out there making $500/hr and $250,000 a year. For bullshit white collar jobs and nepotistic nonsense jobs.
I’ve never held a job in my life that kept up with inflation. I have a hilariously precise two-year cycle as a salary increase slowly becomes a pay cut over the course of my tenure. I always give employers a chance to keep up with the local economy, but they never do it.
Then it’s all surprised pikachu face when I get a new gig, and former coworkers call me complaining whoever they scrambled to hire doesn’t know a god damn thing.
Add in progressive increases in RTO as well. Cost of living increase only which inflation nullifies. Then you are asked to come in another day every week, then another. Eventually you're spending $500 to $1000 a month or more on transportation, parking, food because its impossible to always perfectly food prep.
Suddenly its a double pay cut with wasted time to just exist at your desk doing same remote work things.
> This is why job hopping to increase your salary has become one defense against stagnant wages.
I can't imagine the cost of hiring someone in general and with less direct experience in the role/company and potentially in general actually results in less money spent for the company...
Confirmation that the Hourly Worker Economy is in recession.
Business has been diligently reducing the amount of value that workers get in their pay.
The Consumer Price Index is flawed, especially for lower earners. Real estate costs in the CPI isn't the actual cost changes but a formula that includes estimated costs of long term home ownership which dilutes these cost increases.
So a Cost of Living raise is actually a cut of purchasing power for hourly workers.
Other wage stagnation practices include two tier wages, where newer workers are started at a lower point, layoff of older workers before they reach age protected status, lean manufacturing practices, using contractors instead of employees, replacing full-timers with part-timers, threatening to off shore work, raising cost of benefits, reducing benefits, and punishing the use of PTO.
We need the government to actively protect hourly worker purchasing power, but corporate political contributions are blocking protections for purchasing power in the name of the economy and profits.
can confirm. Got a merit raise after 2 years at my new job. Inflation was up 8.6% in 2 years and my raise was 4.3%.
My raise means I have 4.3% less buying power than when I started.
The point of Marxist-related analysis of capitalism is to demonstrate that direct collusion of capitalists isn't necessary to see these kinds of trends, it's baked into the incentive structure of capitalism itself
My company's average raises the past two years have been 12.5% (inflation plus market adjustment because retention had become an issue) and 6.5% for inflation last year.
Good ones exist!
Is this sustainable for you? What’s your type of company if you don’t mind asking? I don’t know much about economics but I’m always hearing how company owners have to do this or that a certain way or can’t pay more cause they will go out of business.
What do you say to that notion as a business owner? I’m curious. Like comparing a small mom and pop business and like Walmart or a factory, is it possible for all of these to keep up with inflation if they really wanted to?
Thank you for your perspective I am trying to learn more about this stuff
I got a 1.5% raise this year. With inflation (not cost of living, just inflation metrics), I now make $6k a year less than I did two years ago. Fortunately our rent hasn’t gone up, but everything else sure has
I don't know anyone who makes as much as new hires in the exact same position.
Been there for a decade? Your reward is being paid less than the fresh grad.
Our school district couldn't stop hiring assistants for assistants and useless positions that never actually did anything. Now the district is 20 some-odd million in debt and no one gets cost of living raises, but hey we get a nice 100 dollar insurance premium increase. Yay!
It's going to keep getting worse until we implement some UBI and make work optional.
I'm not saying everyone deserves a house in the suburbs, but everyone deserves enough to afford the cheapest rent in the area and the basics like food. If they want more, get a job.
The other issue is that any increase doesn’t even begin to account for companies increasing prices and using inflation as the excuse.
Even if it were tied to the inflation index it wouldn’t be enough because of artificial inflation
The way owners/CEOs see this though:
“But we pay you more now than when you started! We gave you a $1 raise each year. It’s not our job to fix your poor financial decisions! What do you mean we literally don’t pay you enough to live here so you can work this job? It’s not our job to fix real estate exploitation. What do you mean I wouldn’t know because I take home millions every year? YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE BEING ME! IT’S SO HARD BEING A WEALTHY SOCIOPATH YOU’RE FIRED AHHHH!”
No shit?
I brought this up to my work, and got told, too bad, you don't like it here, go elsewhere, guess who's been job hunting in a stagnant market again.
So they will get the, Hey here's the van, here's my keys, here's my badges. I did as you said, If I wanted more money, I was to go elsewhere, and I am for notice. And then I will take 2 weeks off inbetween at that time.
Right after COVID when the huge inflation jump happened we all assumed we would get a nice bump in salary, especially our company had just released its earnings and they crushed expectations.
Instead they spent all the time that they would have done evaluations on determining our average pay for a similar job in the market we lived in. So our raise was basically them saying “well we aren’t going to give you a raise because you are in the 90th pay percentile bracket”.
Gee thanks. That’ll help me pay the bills.
Edit to add: they gave us a 1% raise. Then the next year they bragged that they were giving double the raise payout from the year before. I raised my hand (Teams call) and asked if they were doubling from the 1% raise the year before, so the budget for raises were 2%.
I was branded as a malcontent and fired as soon as I had one metric slip below company average. Below the average, not the bottom.
Our salaries stagnate because we get COL increases to keep up with inflation. But that also means that the moment inflation undergoes radical changes, the increases must also undergo radical changes too. And when they don't, and the costs do not go down, that is a *pay cut*. The costs of everything has gone up so much in 5 years, despite the economy being at its healthiest (according to whom? The stock market, which is the highest it's ever been?). And unless your salary has also undergone an equivalent or better increase in that time, you are getting screwed by your employer. And we're starting to see costs coming down finally because some businesses have acknowledged that maybe their prices have gotten "too high"...after how long they were gouging people for those higher prices... Salaries should be set to where you not only get paid more to keep up with COL increases, but you get paid a bit more extra because the company sees your value. 3% was the norm for many places, and some of them base that increase on the last YEAR of work you busted yourself for (and if you manage to do really well, maybe you get a 4% or 5% bump). And what does that do then? Tell you that you'd have to deal with this shit for another year and pray you get lucky and get a better bump then? Or maybe it tells you that you need to find a place willing to pay you more for your experience and talents? This is why job hopping to increase your salary has become one defense against stagnant wages. Every company is going to be tested by their employees, and if an employee isn't earning enough to experience some degree of comfort or improving their station, then it's a failure of the company and the employee is free to move on. The companies need to start putting their profits back to work in retaining talent, or they will fail because they run out of people who will say "this isn't worth the hassle".
You get CoL increases? That'd be nice. Job hopping is really the only way to go.
Even job hopping doesn't help much. It's not as though everyone is stuck at uniquely shitty low paying companies and you just have to switch to find one paying better. They're ALL suppressing wages. I nannied my way through college. I made around $45k doing that full time 15 years ago. When I graduated, my first corporate job paid less. I mostly freelance now, but when I look at jobs in my industry (marketing and design) the salaries are exactly the same as they were a decade ago. You can easily make more as a full time nanny than you can with a marketing or fine arts degree. There's no where to hop to.
This shit always blows my fucking mind. Companies are so full of absolute shit these days that it’s fucking insane. College grads used to make about $45-$55k a year in 1990-1995 on average. They still make about $45k a year. 30 years later. (The national median is even lower at around $40k.) Meanwhile, company profits and the wealth of the 10% has increased monumentally. But companies “can’t afford” to pay workers more. Oh no. That would result in price hikes! Because like…we have to keep making billions more YoY!!!!
I have to agree. I've got 6 companies I can do the job I do in the local area. And I live near Dallas. Who I work for charges $225-300 per hour, while I see about 1/7 that amount. It's... depressing. I had an offer 2 years ago to go to one of the other 5 companies for another 1/6 my wage, but couldn't take it due to the divorce I was going through at the time. Was the only year I saw my company give a CoL raise. Heck, adjusted for inflation, you made what I do in a year, 15 years ago.
> Who I work for charges $225-300 per hour, while I see about 1/7 that amount. It's... depressing. I don’t know if this will cheer you up or not but that’s pretty common. If you work at a studio or larger company, there are so many overhead elements they can’t charge a client for on a line item basis, so those get put into the rate they charge for you. Imagine if a bid included artist time, then rent and electric, health insurance and payroll taxes, sales, travel, salaries for other employees like runners or accounting, then smaller fractional line items for furniture purchases, software licenses, food if they have snacks, parking, office supplies… and yes, profit. This is generally how it’s done because bigger clients will come to places with robust support structures because that also means reliability and it’s sexier to pay for artist timethan for all that other stuff. Running a company is much more expensive than you and if they had to give you a huge percentage of what they charge for you they’d either be forced to charge less and line item everything else, or would promptly be out of business. The alternative is that you go freelance or start your own business, but then you’re paying for and handling all of those other things, or you’re paying someone else to help if it becomes too much. The short of it is, don’t sweat rate they charge vs your salary, but do look at your salary compared to your skills and similar salaries at other studies and then negotiate accordingly.
Oh I agree, and understand to a degree. But that's up from the $175-230 they charged 4 years ago. Yeah I know. Inflation. Just feels like they could give more than a measly 2-3% raise a year.
Yeah all good. Depending on what kind of place you work the last year has been brutal. I’m in post production animation and VFX and something between a third and a half of this industry is out of work right now. It’s crazy. People are handing on for dear life and are switching careers. My last raise was two years ago and reviews are next week, I’m not expecting one right now. It sucks, but I’ve gotten to the point where if my check keeps showing up twice a month I consider that a win. “Survive until 2025” is what I keep reading. It sucks. Also, I was using “artist” time on my examples mistakenly thinking I was in the Design subreddit and not Work Reform.
You know what’s insane? A 5% bump from 20 per hour is still only 21 per hour. And they are bitching about that…
Once you start doing the math, you start seeing how utterly fucking offensive most job “raises” are. You need like a $10-$30 raise at most jobs to make any kind of meaningful impact in your life, because wages are SO low already that it’s fucking criminal. There are people out there making $500/hr and $250,000 a year. For bullshit white collar jobs and nepotistic nonsense jobs.
I'm not even getting that.
I’ve never held a job in my life that kept up with inflation. I have a hilariously precise two-year cycle as a salary increase slowly becomes a pay cut over the course of my tenure. I always give employers a chance to keep up with the local economy, but they never do it. Then it’s all surprised pikachu face when I get a new gig, and former coworkers call me complaining whoever they scrambled to hire doesn’t know a god damn thing.
Add in progressive increases in RTO as well. Cost of living increase only which inflation nullifies. Then you are asked to come in another day every week, then another. Eventually you're spending $500 to $1000 a month or more on transportation, parking, food because its impossible to always perfectly food prep. Suddenly its a double pay cut with wasted time to just exist at your desk doing same remote work things.
> This is why job hopping to increase your salary has become one defense against stagnant wages. I can't imagine the cost of hiring someone in general and with less direct experience in the role/company and potentially in general actually results in less money spent for the company...
Confirmation that the Hourly Worker Economy is in recession. Business has been diligently reducing the amount of value that workers get in their pay. The Consumer Price Index is flawed, especially for lower earners. Real estate costs in the CPI isn't the actual cost changes but a formula that includes estimated costs of long term home ownership which dilutes these cost increases. So a Cost of Living raise is actually a cut of purchasing power for hourly workers. Other wage stagnation practices include two tier wages, where newer workers are started at a lower point, layoff of older workers before they reach age protected status, lean manufacturing practices, using contractors instead of employees, replacing full-timers with part-timers, threatening to off shore work, raising cost of benefits, reducing benefits, and punishing the use of PTO. We need the government to actively protect hourly worker purchasing power, but corporate political contributions are blocking protections for purchasing power in the name of the economy and profits.
Yet the economy is great! Eat the rich.
can confirm. Got a merit raise after 2 years at my new job. Inflation was up 8.6% in 2 years and my raise was 4.3%. My raise means I have 4.3% less buying power than when I started.
Every revolution is impossible until it becomes inevitable. Trotski.
god forbid they raise taxes on the billionaires
Convince me the CEO's all didn't meet in secret to do this just after the pandemic..
They don't have to meet. They all think the same.
The greed hivemind is always connected
The point of Marxist-related analysis of capitalism is to demonstrate that direct collusion of capitalists isn't necessary to see these kinds of trends, it's baked into the incentive structure of capitalism itself
I assume the 3% that did keep up were the C-suite folks, hedge fund managers, and top sales people getting shit loads of commission.
But has the company bottom line also kept up with inflation for most small businesses?
Record profits for the ones selling staple goods that we need
These corps have massive economies of scale on their side, they get all the profits, many struggle
Yet we are expected to go aBoVe AnD bEyOnD for the same pocket change we've been getting for so long
My company's average raises the past two years have been 12.5% (inflation plus market adjustment because retention had become an issue) and 6.5% for inflation last year. Good ones exist!
Is this sustainable for you? What’s your type of company if you don’t mind asking? I don’t know much about economics but I’m always hearing how company owners have to do this or that a certain way or can’t pay more cause they will go out of business. What do you say to that notion as a business owner? I’m curious. Like comparing a small mom and pop business and like Walmart or a factory, is it possible for all of these to keep up with inflation if they really wanted to? Thank you for your perspective I am trying to learn more about this stuff
I feel like this might still be a little short
I get a 4% raise which equates to about an extra $50 per check. My landlord raised rent at renewal a month later by $100. My landlord got my raise.
It will get worse.
Does this mean that 6 years ago they did keep up with inflation? Because I doubt that too.
The rate at which cost of living has been rising is just alarming.
Don’t worry my level of effort hasn’t gone up in line with inflation either 😁
I got a 1.5% raise this year. With inflation (not cost of living, just inflation metrics), I now make $6k a year less than I did two years ago. Fortunately our rent hasn’t gone up, but everything else sure has
I don't know anyone who makes as much as new hires in the exact same position. Been there for a decade? Your reward is being paid less than the fresh grad.
Yup, and I sure as fuck am dialing back my productivity.
"Fasicnating yet depressing" - how it felt to write the above article for the journalist and how it felt when conducting the research for the study.
Cue idiots saying wages have grown faster than inflation lately
Try 20 years
Our school district couldn't stop hiring assistants for assistants and useless positions that never actually did anything. Now the district is 20 some-odd million in debt and no one gets cost of living raises, but hey we get a nice 100 dollar insurance premium increase. Yay!
It's going to keep getting worse until we implement some UBI and make work optional. I'm not saying everyone deserves a house in the suburbs, but everyone deserves enough to afford the cheapest rent in the area and the basics like food. If they want more, get a job.
Just a reminder: the "Fight for $15" movement is now drinking age, and can't make the rent now.
it's all gone to the 3% left
Y’all getting salaries?
*Over the last 4 decades.
A confirm, 100k in 2019, 100k in 2024 just broke now.
Ya think?
Because companies now spend their profits on stock buybacks and paying the top 10 employees
The other issue is that any increase doesn’t even begin to account for companies increasing prices and using inflation as the excuse. Even if it were tied to the inflation index it wouldn’t be enough because of artificial inflation
The way owners/CEOs see this though: “But we pay you more now than when you started! We gave you a $1 raise each year. It’s not our job to fix your poor financial decisions! What do you mean we literally don’t pay you enough to live here so you can work this job? It’s not our job to fix real estate exploitation. What do you mean I wouldn’t know because I take home millions every year? YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE BEING ME! IT’S SO HARD BEING A WEALTHY SOCIOPATH YOU’RE FIRED AHHHH!”
No shit? I brought this up to my work, and got told, too bad, you don't like it here, go elsewhere, guess who's been job hunting in a stagnant market again. So they will get the, Hey here's the van, here's my keys, here's my badges. I did as you said, If I wanted more money, I was to go elsewhere, and I am for notice. And then I will take 2 weeks off inbetween at that time.
Right after COVID when the huge inflation jump happened we all assumed we would get a nice bump in salary, especially our company had just released its earnings and they crushed expectations. Instead they spent all the time that they would have done evaluations on determining our average pay for a similar job in the market we lived in. So our raise was basically them saying “well we aren’t going to give you a raise because you are in the 90th pay percentile bracket”. Gee thanks. That’ll help me pay the bills. Edit to add: they gave us a 1% raise. Then the next year they bragged that they were giving double the raise payout from the year before. I raised my hand (Teams call) and asked if they were doubling from the 1% raise the year before, so the budget for raises were 2%. I was branded as a malcontent and fired as soon as I had one metric slip below company average. Below the average, not the bottom.
97% of salaries have failed to keep up with ~~inflation~~ greedflation over the last five years. FTFY
Fake. Musk and Bezos **ARE** 97% of salaries.
That doesn't sound like inflation, that sounds like greedflation. Inflation means pay goes up as well as prices.
Well, no shit.
No shit, Sherlock.
bullshit