Gee, maybe it has something to do with work not being the only thing that brings human beings joy.
Wages may be up if you get a new job but wages aren’t going up if you stay in your current job.
Wages haven’t kept up with the price increases
People aren’t going to be happy when they finally get their salaries back to where they were a few years ago, in relation to prices…
Housing. It’s housing. That’s the issue. Both rent and homes are increasingly unaffordable, and their costs have far outpaced any wage increases. Without a stable, secure roof over people’s heads, they will feel anxious regardless of jobs being available.
>Right now, people are frustrated by inflation that, while cooling, is still higher than it has been in many people’s lifetimes, and they’re still missing 2019 prices.
This is the issue with just looking at inflation or GDP overall. For decades, decreasing competition, increasing privatization, and corporate mergers tending towards monopoly/oligopoly has slashed the bottom 90% of earners’ share of the country’s wealth *in half* even as profits skyrocket.
This isn’t an inflation or even an economy problem, it’s an income inequality problem. *Most* people aren’t feeling the benefits, only a very few are.
I live in a large midwestern city and i’ve been applying for jobs for 6months and gotten minimal interviews and the salaries are usually around 45-55k which is not enough. Not sure why I keep seeing stuff like this cause I know of others in the same boat.
Edit: I have 6 years of creative services/communication experience
The media tells me to be unhappy. But I look at my retirement savings and count the days to early retirement. About the only thing that would slow that process down would be electing Republicans in 2024…
I want Americans to have the child tax credit again. I want Americans to have proper universal healthcare, not health insurance. I want college tuition reform, preferably covering public 4 year undergraduate degrees, but I’d be happy with 2 year AA degrees being covered. I think k-12 kids should be fed healthy meals universally. I want housing cost reforms. Etc, etc.
Everything I want for America is infinitely more possible by electing fewer Republicans.
Wages have not gone up nearly enough to compete with the rising cost of living. 5% col increase? Here’s a 1% raise.
What an idiotic article.
Acknowledging that people are upset about inflation and then casually passing by the corporate greed of tip-wage subsidiaries. Corporations refuse to pay employees better and they want their consumers to shoulder the burden of livable wage. There isn’t anything in this article digging into corporate greed and record profits year after year after year. Not a single mention of greed or profit. So basically, corporations are fucking people and this article is to say: hey, there’s plenty of fucking going around why aren’t people happy with getting fucked out of security?
Seems weird to me to say the job markets good when all I hear is lay offs from the Tech industry.
>Given the strength of the current labor market, it’s fair to think things should feel better. Many people (though not everyone) are making quite a bit more than they were four years ago. It can feel almost more frustrating that your job is finally paying you well, you’re in the spot you wanted to be in, and you still can’t afford things easily. Gas and groceries remain a pain. You finally got to take that vacation, but it was more than you expected to pay, and the service at the hotel was dismal. Moreover, full employment does not address how prohibitively expensive some major pillars of our economy are — health care, child care, higher education, housing. “Making it” in America today doesn’t feel very made.
This, along with a few other paragraphs, is such a bizarre way to look at it.
If basic things like gas and groceries are a pain, it would suggest you are not “finally being paid well” or “in the spot you want to be”
They’re basically saying “they don’t perceive things as good because they aren’t good, but actually they are good”
Wages are going up, but not as fast as COL.
We’re “finally making the 15/hour we should be making” – From 2006. If Min-wage climbed as it should have, with our current economy, it should be over 20-25/hour.
We’ve got the richest country in the world inhabited by lower-middle-class-and-below citizens having their income average disrupted by the 1% who hoard all the money and property.
They own the businesses that extract the bulk of your labor as their own ‘income’ and they rent land to theirs and others workers, taking back 1/3-1/2 of their earnings just to exist in a space with slum-lord level maintenance.
They’ve increased rent by nearly double, and food costs the same, and then increase wages by 25%.
What a farce, to say that the average American is living better today. If you only look at wages through a tube and ignore everything else on the ledger, sure.
There’s this big cloud of doom. It’s different for most people. For me it’s rising utility costs and the loss of homeowners insurance in my CA foothills home. For others it’s fuel and food prices. The rising costs outweigh wage increases and the homeless numbers keep climbing with the homeless making city living worse.
Solution for some: Let’s put the worst possible person imaginable in charge.
People never realize it while it is happening. Democrats get shit moving, then a republican gets elected and fucks it up, and it repeats.
As long as prices of food, light, water, gas, clothing, autos, you name are higher than a cat’s back, then my life sucks.
Because cost of living is ridiculous.
Hell, just healthcare alone.
Again, as the “strongest most powerful country in the world”, we can’t provide the one public good that everyother country gives for free.
Even more disgusting when I hear nationalists cry “well the American system is superior to socialized health care”.
Sure….. If you can afford it.
Until I can afford a mortgage in an area I actually want to live in then the whole system and my expectation to be happy with the crumbs I’m thrown every few years can go fuck itself.
The cost of food and utilities are ridiculous. My electric bill alone is nearly five hundred a month. Where I live, a gallon of milk is four dollars. It doesn’t matter that my husband got a raise. Every basic thing that we need has tripled in price. So his raise did shit for us.
Corporate profits are highest since the 1950’s, is anyone else getting tired of companies screwing us over?
Let’s see: the price of basic necessities continues to go up, there’s no check on the price of healthcare/medicine, and half the country prefers fascism to democracy. I mean…
Whose wages are rising? Not mine, but I’m in South Carolina so I guess that doesn’t count. I live in one of the lowest paying counties in the entire country 😭
We live in strange times. The economy is doing objectively well by historical metrics but a significant percentage of Americans aren’t seeing any benefit.
The country is killing itself. The lawmakers are allowing corporations to become too greedy, and it is killing the country.
In my industry I see jobs with the requirements of basically being CEO but pay as if you were almost entry level. It’s a joke
If jobs are so plentiful why is it that every single decent professional job posting has 100+ applicants after 24 hours?
Raising wages from 12$ to 15$ when a livable wage is already probably 20$ in most of the country is why no ones happy, so sick of hearing about companies giving “raises” after staff begs for years only to get a minor raise that they should have had years ago and are still well below inflation, and worse so with no benefits for most of the country, healthcare, childcare, PTO the US is a fuckin disaster when it comes to workers rights.
Yeah its housing from both sides of ownership.
Prices are too high to purchase but interest rates have made tough situation even more impossible.
Homeowners can’t afford to pull money out of their homes because of interest rates. They now feel the tightening as their homes dip slightly and their access to cheap cash is dried up.
Rents are INSANELY high. 2300.00 for a POS 2 bedroom apartment in a fly over state in a town 30 mi from a major metropolitan area?!?!?!? really?
Yay gas is 50 cents a gallon cheaper but WTF stop telling me how good the economy is and how happy I should be.
Who is the out of touch motherfucker who wrote this? I bet they have a stable career and steady plentiful income.
If the kajillionaires paid income tax at the rate I do, we could have a middle class again.
That’s because prices have been rising faster than wages for about 40 years.
If I’m underwater and sinking at a rate of ten feet per minute it doesn’t help if something slows that descent by two feet per minute.
And even if something stopped my descent altogether, I’m still pretty far under water.
Rising wages don’t undo the past, nor do they necessarily correct your present position and predicament if the purchasing power of those wages keeps dropping.
Because rent, home, and food prices, which are necessities we need to live, continue to be astronomical. We are working harder and making more money than ever, but are still barely getting by.
We need to stop treating housing and food as a commodity. They are necessitates.
My wife and I have the largest combined income we have ever had by far and we are having the most trouble affording things than we ever have. It’s not just the every day things like groceries and gas that are out of control. But heaven forbid you have a health issue or any kind of car/house repair that you need to take care of. And we are lucky cause we have a decent income and got our house right before the rates skyrocketed. I honestly don’t know how anybody with a lower income is surviving this crap right now.
Housing and inflation are why people are not happy. Yea wages are rising but nobody is seeing a difference because they’re either paying just about the same as before or more at the register. My car insurance went up almost $60 a month because of “inflation.”
Everyone is unhappy because wages may go up 2% but everything else goes up 10% and more.
“jobs are plentiful”
Go on Blind or LinkedIn and see how many people laid off in the past year are struggling to find work in their field or even retail.
This is a losing fucking message. The dems need to stop saying this shit. Wages are rising yes, but not rising anywhere near enough to combat ~~greed~~ inflation over the last 3 years.
Family of 4 would be hard pressed to eat at a common chain restaurant for less than 80 dollars including a tip. 40 at McDonald’s.
I don’t want to hear this “jobs are plentiful” bullshit when I graduated college in May and have sent out countless applications for nothing.
Corporate greed is keeping prices high.
Corporate greed is keeping people in chronic job insecurity which ties into health insurance insecurity, housing and everything else.
Where I work they are raking in massive historic profits, laying people off and doing hiring and wage freezes.
41 comments
Gee, maybe it has something to do with work not being the only thing that brings human beings joy.
Wages may be up if you get a new job but wages aren’t going up if you stay in your current job.
Wages haven’t kept up with the price increases
People aren’t going to be happy when they finally get their salaries back to where they were a few years ago, in relation to prices…
Housing. It’s housing. That’s the issue. Both rent and homes are increasingly unaffordable, and their costs have far outpaced any wage increases. Without a stable, secure roof over people’s heads, they will feel anxious regardless of jobs being available.
>Right now, people are frustrated by inflation that, while cooling, is still higher than it has been in many people’s lifetimes, and they’re still missing 2019 prices.
This is the issue with just looking at inflation or GDP overall. For decades, decreasing competition, increasing privatization, and corporate mergers tending towards monopoly/oligopoly has slashed the bottom 90% of earners’ share of the country’s wealth *in half* even as profits skyrocket.
This isn’t an inflation or even an economy problem, it’s an income inequality problem. *Most* people aren’t feeling the benefits, only a very few are.
I live in a large midwestern city and i’ve been applying for jobs for 6months and gotten minimal interviews and the salaries are usually around 45-55k which is not enough. Not sure why I keep seeing stuff like this cause I know of others in the same boat.
Edit: I have 6 years of creative services/communication experience
The media tells me to be unhappy. But I look at my retirement savings and count the days to early retirement. About the only thing that would slow that process down would be electing Republicans in 2024…
I want Americans to have the child tax credit again. I want Americans to have proper universal healthcare, not health insurance. I want college tuition reform, preferably covering public 4 year undergraduate degrees, but I’d be happy with 2 year AA degrees being covered. I think k-12 kids should be fed healthy meals universally. I want housing cost reforms. Etc, etc.
Everything I want for America is infinitely more possible by electing fewer Republicans.
Wages have not gone up nearly enough to compete with the rising cost of living. 5% col increase? Here’s a 1% raise.
What an idiotic article.
Acknowledging that people are upset about inflation and then casually passing by the corporate greed of tip-wage subsidiaries. Corporations refuse to pay employees better and they want their consumers to shoulder the burden of livable wage. There isn’t anything in this article digging into corporate greed and record profits year after year after year. Not a single mention of greed or profit. So basically, corporations are fucking people and this article is to say: hey, there’s plenty of fucking going around why aren’t people happy with getting fucked out of security?
Seems weird to me to say the job markets good when all I hear is lay offs from the Tech industry.
“Wages are rising” because Unions are striking.
https://www.ufcw.org/start-a-union/
>Given the strength of the current labor market, it’s fair to think things should feel better. Many people (though not everyone) are making quite a bit more than they were four years ago. It can feel almost more frustrating that your job is finally paying you well, you’re in the spot you wanted to be in, and you still can’t afford things easily. Gas and groceries remain a pain. You finally got to take that vacation, but it was more than you expected to pay, and the service at the hotel was dismal. Moreover, full employment does not address how prohibitively expensive some major pillars of our economy are — health care, child care, higher education, housing. “Making it” in America today doesn’t feel very made.
This, along with a few other paragraphs, is such a bizarre way to look at it.
If basic things like gas and groceries are a pain, it would suggest you are not “finally being paid well” or “in the spot you want to be”
They’re basically saying “they don’t perceive things as good because they aren’t good, but actually they are good”
Wages are going up, but not as fast as COL.
We’re “finally making the 15/hour we should be making” – From 2006. If Min-wage climbed as it should have, with our current economy, it should be over 20-25/hour.
We’ve got the richest country in the world inhabited by lower-middle-class-and-below citizens having their income average disrupted by the 1% who hoard all the money and property.
They own the businesses that extract the bulk of your labor as their own ‘income’ and they rent land to theirs and others workers, taking back 1/3-1/2 of their earnings just to exist in a space with slum-lord level maintenance.
They’ve increased rent by nearly double, and food costs the same, and then increase wages by 25%.
What a farce, to say that the average American is living better today. If you only look at wages through a tube and ignore everything else on the ledger, sure.
There’s this big cloud of doom. It’s different for most people. For me it’s rising utility costs and the loss of homeowners insurance in my CA foothills home. For others it’s fuel and food prices. The rising costs outweigh wage increases and the homeless numbers keep climbing with the homeless making city living worse.
Solution for some: Let’s put the worst possible person imaginable in charge.
People never realize it while it is happening. Democrats get shit moving, then a republican gets elected and fucks it up, and it repeats.
As long as prices of food, light, water, gas, clothing, autos, you name are higher than a cat’s back, then my life sucks.
Because cost of living is ridiculous.
Hell, just healthcare alone.
Again, as the “strongest most powerful country in the world”, we can’t provide the one public good that everyother country gives for free.
Even more disgusting when I hear nationalists cry “well the American system is superior to socialized health care”.
Sure….. If you can afford it.
Until I can afford a mortgage in an area I actually want to live in then the whole system and my expectation to be happy with the crumbs I’m thrown every few years can go fuck itself.
The cost of food and utilities are ridiculous. My electric bill alone is nearly five hundred a month. Where I live, a gallon of milk is four dollars. It doesn’t matter that my husband got a raise. Every basic thing that we need has tripled in price. So his raise did shit for us.
[The loss of the the Third Place is also a contributing factor outside of housing, grocery and transportation costs.](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/third-places-meet-new-people-pandemic/629468/)
Corporate profits are highest since the 1950’s, is anyone else getting tired of companies screwing us over?
Let’s see: the price of basic necessities continues to go up, there’s no check on the price of healthcare/medicine, and half the country prefers fascism to democracy. I mean…
Whose wages are rising? Not mine, but I’m in South Carolina so I guess that doesn’t count. I live in one of the lowest paying counties in the entire country 😭
We live in strange times. The economy is doing objectively well by historical metrics but a significant percentage of Americans aren’t seeing any benefit.
The country is killing itself. The lawmakers are allowing corporations to become too greedy, and it is killing the country.
In my industry I see jobs with the requirements of basically being CEO but pay as if you were almost entry level. It’s a joke
If jobs are so plentiful why is it that every single decent professional job posting has 100+ applicants after 24 hours?
Raising wages from 12$ to 15$ when a livable wage is already probably 20$ in most of the country is why no ones happy, so sick of hearing about companies giving “raises” after staff begs for years only to get a minor raise that they should have had years ago and are still well below inflation, and worse so with no benefits for most of the country, healthcare, childcare, PTO the US is a fuckin disaster when it comes to workers rights.
Yeah its housing from both sides of ownership.
Prices are too high to purchase but interest rates have made tough situation even more impossible.
Homeowners can’t afford to pull money out of their homes because of interest rates. They now feel the tightening as their homes dip slightly and their access to cheap cash is dried up.
Rents are INSANELY high. 2300.00 for a POS 2 bedroom apartment in a fly over state in a town 30 mi from a major metropolitan area?!?!?!? really?
Yay gas is 50 cents a gallon cheaper but WTF stop telling me how good the economy is and how happy I should be.
Who is the out of touch motherfucker who wrote this? I bet they have a stable career and steady plentiful income.
If the kajillionaires paid income tax at the rate I do, we could have a middle class again.
That’s because prices have been rising faster than wages for about 40 years.
If I’m underwater and sinking at a rate of ten feet per minute it doesn’t help if something slows that descent by two feet per minute.
And even if something stopped my descent altogether, I’m still pretty far under water.
Rising wages don’t undo the past, nor do they necessarily correct your present position and predicament if the purchasing power of those wages keeps dropping.
Because rent, home, and food prices, which are necessities we need to live, continue to be astronomical. We are working harder and making more money than ever, but are still barely getting by.
We need to stop treating housing and food as a commodity. They are necessitates.
My wife and I have the largest combined income we have ever had by far and we are having the most trouble affording things than we ever have. It’s not just the every day things like groceries and gas that are out of control. But heaven forbid you have a health issue or any kind of car/house repair that you need to take care of. And we are lucky cause we have a decent income and got our house right before the rates skyrocketed. I honestly don’t know how anybody with a lower income is surviving this crap right now.
Housing and inflation are why people are not happy. Yea wages are rising but nobody is seeing a difference because they’re either paying just about the same as before or more at the register. My car insurance went up almost $60 a month because of “inflation.”
Everyone is unhappy because wages may go up 2% but everything else goes up 10% and more.
“jobs are plentiful”
Go on Blind or LinkedIn and see how many people laid off in the past year are struggling to find work in their field or even retail.
This is a losing fucking message. The dems need to stop saying this shit. Wages are rising yes, but not rising anywhere near enough to combat ~~greed~~ inflation over the last 3 years.
Family of 4 would be hard pressed to eat at a common chain restaurant for less than 80 dollars including a tip. 40 at McDonald’s.
I don’t want to hear this “jobs are plentiful” bullshit when I graduated college in May and have sent out countless applications for nothing.
Corporate greed is keeping prices high.
Corporate greed is keeping people in chronic job insecurity which ties into health insurance insecurity, housing and everything else.
Where I work they are raking in massive historic profits, laying people off and doing hiring and wage freezes.
Nothing is “trickling down”