https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/
After (apparently too many) years at Dell, adjusting my starting wage for inflation and I'm effectively at the same rate even after multiple certs, promotions, awards and such.
I find it interesting that our team meetings usually openly compare and scrutinize individual performance yet it's very important we not mention compensation for some reason. Wouldn't it make sense that if we want to use merit based incentive we should be seeing how much the hard workers get paid and how much work the best paid do?
Sure, it's illegal to fire employees for discussing wages, but thanks to at will employment we can be fired for "no reason at all" then try to sue for retaliation, back wages, and return to an actively hostile employer.
Michael Dell has repeatedly shown he's not great at history or economics: https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1088514254301528065?lang=en
In simplest terms, capitalism is an economic model where capitalists own the means of production and workers sell bits of their life for wages. That's it. It's not innovation. It's not lifting people out of poverty. It's selling a product for as much as possible while paying as little as possible for supplies and labor (us). As a result, a very small number of people end up with most of the resources while a very large number of people fight over crumbs.
Buying things doesn't make you a capitalist. Having wages doesn't make you a capitalist. In fact, the only thing that makes you a capitalist is having your money work for you. If you work for your money, you will most likely always just be a worker because that's how the system is designed to keep you. ( Like the 2017 Trump Tax and jobs act. The tax cuts for individuals started expiring the next year while the ones for corporations and the wealthy were permanent. Or how inflation is driven by the creation of currency by the Fed at the behest of the private banks it's owned by, but that's all a very messy subject on its own.)
The rising cost of living has be brought up on some all hands. People told executive management wages haven't kept pace with cost of living and executive management told him "our competitors haven't raised wages, so we're not going to either."
What about being a market leader involves waiting for competition? So much for doing the right thing.
We're individual peons underfoot of billionaires. While Michael Dell and his cohorts jerk each other off at places like Davos and suppress wages and discuss draconian RTW policies and the next round anti worker "right to work" and "at will employment" laws.
Since 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement, news and social media have been we-ponized to fan any possible divide. Man vs woman. White vs black. G-y vs straight. Red vs blue. Old vs young. And whatever this pronoun business is...
It's all to keep us from fighting each other so we can't fight them because ultimately workers have all the power- but only when we're capable of working together.
I've heard a lot of yall near the mothership talk politics and you'd be well served to give all 40 pages of the communist manifesto a read. You don't have to pick up a hammer and sickle to understand why you as a worker need collective bargaining and unionization to protect your quality of life. We have 40 years of failed Regeanomics showing us trickledown doesn't work and economies grow when workers have money.