#wage increases

my manager (different person) asked for wage increases for our entire store

now our boss is trying to push her out of the manager position and install someone who is going to lick his boots

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “To which degree is not having enough time, and being relatively busy, contribute to most people not being able to come up with new ground breaking ideas, make new inventions, or even making novels, manga etc.?” Many answers are the typical soporifics based on the presumption that today’s economics are “normal.” There is no…

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you feel that Wal Mart employee’s lack of performance could be due to the fact that welfare literally forces people to accept a job offer or lose benefits that provide Food and Housing? Support #UBI” When employers don’t care about their staff, their staff stops caring about them. When employees stop caring about their…

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t big businesses reduce profits instead of increasing prices when forced to raise wages?| Never in the history of generating income for oneself has anyone ever said, “Gee… I think I earned too much money. I should give some of it back.” The answers you’ve gotten essentially echo the above sentence. For example, many…

“War Bonus Is Urged For Steel Workers,” Toronto Star. August 23, 1940. Page 02. ---- General Wage Increases Recommended by Dispute Board ---- Ottawa, Aug. 23. - Payment of a war bonus to all workmen if the cost of living rises five per cent. within six months of signing of an agreement, is recommended by the board of conciliation which dealt with disputes between the Algoma Steel Corp., Ltd., and some employees.

in its finding, released by Hon. Norman McLarty, minister of labor, the board also recommended wage increases. Employees involved were: Algoma Steel Workers’ union, members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, and members of Lodge 485 of the International Association of Machinists.

An increase of two cents an hour for maintenance men was recommended. The board further urged a general increase of 8 .2 cents an hour and proportionate increases in tonnage rates. Employees receiving less than $125 a month, the board suggested, should get a two cents an hour increase, and those in receipt of between $125 and $150 a month, one cent.

Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, July 31, 2018

Stock buybacks are eating the world. The once illegal practice of companies purchasing their own shares is pulling money away from employee compensation, research and development, and other corporate priorities--with potentially sweeping effects on business dynamism, income and wealth inequality, working-class economic stagnation, and the country’s growth rate. Evidence for that conclusion comes from a new report by Irene Tung of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Katy Milani of the Roosevelt Institute, who looked at share buybacks in the restaurant, retail, and food industries from 2015 to 2017.

Their new paper contributes to a growing body of research that might help explain why economic growth is so sluggish, productivity so low, and increases in worker compensation so piddling, even as the stock market is surging and corporate profits are at historical highs. Companies are working overtime to make their owners richer in the short term, more so than to improve their longer-term competitiveness or to invest in their workers.

Buybacks occur when a company takes profits, cash reserves, or borrowed money to purchase its own shares on the public markets, a practice barred until the Ronald Reagan administration. (The regulatory argument against allowing the practice is that it is a way for companies to manipulate the markets; the regulatory argument for it is that companies should be able to spend money how they see fit.) In recent years, with corporate profits high, American firms have bought their own stocks with extraordinary zeal. Federal Reserve data show that buybacks are now equivalent to 4 percent of annual economic output, up from zero percent in the 1990s. Companies spent roughly $7 trillion on their own shares from 2004 to 2014, and have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on buybacks in the past six months alone.

The new Roosevelt Institute and NELP research examines public firms in three major but notoriously low-wage industries--food production, retail, and restaurants--weighing buybacks against worker compensation. Unsurprisingly, Tung and Milani found that companies were aggressive in purchasing their own shares. The restaurant industry spent 140 percent of its profits on buybacks from 2015 to 2017, meaning that it borrowed or dipped into its cash allowances to purchase the shares. The retail industry spent nearly 80 percent of its profits on buybacks, and food-manufacturing firms nearly 60 percent. All in all, public companies across the American economy spent roughly three-fifths of their profits on buybacks in the years studied. “The amount corporations are spending on buybacks is staggering,” Milani said. “Then, to look a little deeper and see how this could impact workers in terms of compensation, was staggering.”

How much might workers have benefited if companies had devoted their financial resources to them rather than to shareholders? Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot could have provided each of their workers a raise of $18,000 a year, the report found. Starbucks could have given each of its employees $7,000 a year, and McDonald’s could have given $4,000 to each of its nearly 2 million employees.

This article is old, but still applicable today, although it is worth noting that the situation is more complicated than simply “everyone benefits from this”, because there are actually a lot of intricacies to consider. 

For example: in my workplace, every single employee was given a 25cent raise recently.  And while I’m happy about it in general, I’m also vaguely upset because this means that none of us who worked hard to get an actual raise are getting that. I worked harder and took on extra responsibilities in the last year, but I got precisely the same raise as everyone else, even new employees who only recently started. As a long-time employee who has now not gotten a raise in over two years, that makes me feel underappreciated and less inclined to work with such drive in the future.

And honestly, once you factor in the ever-increasing cost of living, this raise doesn’t do much. I mean, yes, I’ll be making $10 more a week, technically. But much good does that do me if the prices for groceries, gas, and everything else go up as well?