This seems to be a pattern lately with businesses. With inflation skyrocketing, people want more money for their labor to keep up with their devaluing paycheck. They feel that after the Covid layoffs of all the people that didn’t get the shot, companies had plenty of money stored up to pay them a massive wage increase now since they had less workers to pay then. That is not how the world works. Companies look to future profitability for whether or not it’s cost effective to increase wages, not back to money already in shareholders’ pockets from past earnings. When we are going into a recession, companies will be looking at every possible way to cut costs, and unfortunately that doesn’t include increasing pay dramatically. It sucks for everyone, but people aren’t going to get big raises to keep up with massive inflation, nor are prices going to come down on necessities for consumers anytime soon. As long as we have too many dollars chasing too few goods, we’ll have problems with inflation. As long as we have too few workers making those goods, this will continue. Too few workers chasing after more dollars chasing after too few goods (made by too few workers) is the recipe for an inflationary death spiral. These worker strikes are just the beginning. A lot of businesses have been struggling to survive with inflation, supply chain issues, government regulations, minimum wage increases, etc. You may find that when the dust settles, many businesses will decide to cut their losses and go out of business rather than pay what they don’t think they can afford to employees wanting a raise. The Railroad workers may strike in mid September. Many of the truck drivers in California already have gone on strike due to AB5. The port workers in California are still without a contract and almost went on strike already. The President intervened. The pharmacists at Ralph’s, Vons, Albertsons, and Pavillions in San Diego have voted to strike but no official date has been set for the strike. A hotel near ComicCon in San Diego decided to strike during the time of the convention. While I get that people want to pick a side (pro union or not), remember that we lose no matter what. They get their raise, our grocery prices go up. The don’t get their raise, we can’t get our groceries when they strike.
