I talk a lot about inflation and salaries as someone whose head spins daily about it and I do think it’s important. But something that I think more people should keep in mind in a simple “know what you’re entitled to” way is how drastic the inflation rate has been in the last 5 years not just on its own but relative to a serious downward trend in raises year over year.
There was a brief period in 2021 (the “great resignation”) where it was an employee’s market, but because a lot of people changed jobs, while a small fraction of industries were able to tempt skilled employees with good salaries and benefits in order to hire and appear healthily in growth mode, the question of raises fell to the wayside even more than usual. Especially because this happened during Covid—at the time a lot of employers just completely stopped offering cost of living adjustment raises as an “emergency response” to the economy. And then…they just never picked them back up. Every year became a “challenging year” and it was normalized for a shaken-up workforce that you wouldn’t get a modest increase in wages annually. While a lot of industries especially the ones most visibly in need of wage reform like food service have had static wages for decades, a lot of our workforce in places like public service, education, manufacturing/engineering, and mid-level white collar jobs, the types of careers that, at bare minimum, exist of offset the initial investment a huge part of our generation in America has made into the 4-year college system, were able to keep their heads above water more easily if they landed a job that would at least kind of take care of their needs in this regard. It was considered a dealbreaker for many people looking to switch careers if that wasn’t offered.
I think when we talk about raises and upward mobility we associate it with middle class people making the jump from lower mid to upper mid; this is really the only major type of class mobility that exists in America. You might grow up with parents who have no savings, and eventually become the type of person who can save and take their kids to Disneyland. It’s kind of hard to see this being denied to people as a crisis given that poverty is inescapable. However I think the type of slow decline in wage stability relative to inflation is extremely scary because it actually means many people are backsliding out of even being lower middle class without realizing it. In the grand scheme of things this is a less urgent wage crisis than what effects hourly wage workers, but because of that I think a lot of people don’t realize it’s effecting them, and feel guilty or frustrated when they have what looks like a stable career and feel something slip away from them.
For example: my second salaried job out of college was at the corporate packaging & purchasing department of a major dairy supplier in Buffalo. I made $45k plus benefits in 2018, a major raise from the $15/hr I’d been making before. People in that office had had careers at the company that lasted 15, 20 years, and relied partially on a steady, expected annual reassessment and cost of living raise. Without it, their stability their salary offered them would drift away slightly every year. This is bad for many reasons, but particularly because when you grow a career somewhere, it’s likely your life grows with you in terms of costs: you start a family, maybe need to take care of your elderly parents eventually.
What I hear anecdotally though this has changed radically in almost all career fields. There is no guarantee wage increases will ever be normalized again to the degree they were pre-Covid, and inflation has increased roughly 23% since 2021. The $45k I made in 2018 is worth $33k now. That is simply true. Let’s assume that company was generous enough to raise that salary commensurate with inflation to $50k by 2021. If they had done that yearly to meet the economic realities by 2026, that person should be making $61,000. But they’re not. They’re making the material equivalent of half of that, basically. That is a massive, mind-boggling gap, and has nothing to do with the role itself, just the value of money, and a lot of people who entered the workforce in the 2020s have no idea just how much they are being denied because (like I was in 2018!) they’re in their early 20s and happy to have a salaried job. But while that salary bought me my first car and enabled me to do things like host people who weren’t able to have stable housing at my apartment, it is simply not offering that to people today.
The tough thing about salary convos is that it is factually true that everyone should be making more, and again, to a person making a poverty wage these numbers feel like cartoon math. And we really only hear about the “vanishing middle class” from the POV of a moderate’s cultural anxiety—the threat to the “middle class” as news pundits would have it is at attack on the nuclear family, the 2-car garage and a pool. That’s a bunch of noise and fantasy. But that doesn’t change the fact that an increasing number of people once earned a living wage, and that same wage at the same job is a living wage no longer. That has a ripple effect in our current system where we’re all donating to each others’ GoFundMes and trying to stay sane. When I lived in Buffalo my favorite people were college professors and public servants who had managed to buy homes early; they were not rich, but I could come to their house for an afternoon and just breathe. When we did organizing work, it happened at houses like that, and we were able to make good things happen because a person had a home office, a car to transport people in, a printer with ink in it. It made me realize how much a small measure of having your shit together helps others to do the same, and I try to imitate that in my own life. I’m not exactly a pilar of my community or anything, but even at the time I felt like my relative financial stability—which came solely from my salary, not family or savings—helped people around me to be slightly more stable too. And it actually freaks me out so much how that stable middle section is disappearing. Like man. Forget garages and Disneyland!! That is the scary shit to me.
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