Inflation doesn't - fundamentally - change the power balance between employers and employees. Market forces will cause the situation to find a fair market price. If job hopping can't get you better wages, then you probably don't have enough market power to resist if an employer flat-out cuts your pay.

Though to try and prevent misunderstandings - I do think inflation is bad for people who are paid wages. Market forces aren't perfect and "market price" is really a band of prices. Inflation pushes all workers to the low end of the band and means if anyone doesn't feel like negotiating they will be pushed in to a bad deal by default.

Late last century inflation and then wages keeping up with that inflation enabled a generation of folks to pay off their first mortgages quite quickly.

That is saying a lot less than you might think. Again, consider that the banks employ actuaries - they understand inflation a lot better than the people borrowing the money. They didn't let themselves be the losers here.

Inflation doesn't change the actual power balance between different actors, it does make the situation more complex and harder to keep up with. It doesn't create real wealth and it is not responsible for a wealth transfer to wage earners. The idea just lacks a mechanism - for the wealth to come from employers or businesses they have to be ignorant, altruistic and disinterested in money. That seems unlikely. Ditto most other actors. Changing value of money favours people who can continuously adjust to it which isn't a typical wage earner.

If a generation gets something for free, they got it from somewhere else. Who lost out here? Why did it need to be inflation to make that happen? If they didn't get it for free, it is unclear why inflation would be necessary in the story instead of incidental.

Absolutely but this also assumes a fairly "elastic" housing market able to absorb the demand. I am not sure the market is still able to do that with the NYMBYsm and malthusianism around new housing. In high tension area, the price could quickly increase faster than general inflation. I believe CPI does not include house prices.

Risk is that rising inflation raises mortgage rates which makes housing unaffordable. You might be able to continue paying your mortgage because you locked in a low rate, so not see this as a problem (free house!)-- but if for some reason you want or need to sell you might find it more financially challenging than anticipated.

If you timed it right. Several of my friends’ parents had 18% APR mortgages.

It allowed a very small slice of the population to do that. You basically had to take on a loan prior to the run up in interest rates. If you were born in 1950 you were fucked since rates had skyrocketed by the time you were 20.

Just like millennials love to claim boomers had it easy, it was a small slice of the pie that benefited.

Look at Sweden. The collectively bargained pay increase was below inflation in all sectors.

You should unionize for many reasons but I wouldn't trust it as an efficient tool for pay negotiations.

I've never seen a pay increase above ~2% here in Sweden. Some union agreements allow larger (and lower) changes if the average increase is still the decided upon percentage.

Eh, I'm unionized and had a 13% pay raise. To be fair, they motivated that by saying that I should get up to speed with other engineer's raises instead of staying at a junior level (yes, I'm bragging).

What I'm reading here is the union kept your initial wages 13% below market

Unions in Nordic countries don't stop employers from paying more, they just set minimum pay level. And usually the normal raise level. They can always pay more and usually do with fields like software engineering.

Nah, I was straight out of uni so taken on as a junior by the company and then given a raise as they didn't consider me junior after having me work there for 8 months or so. The union is probably involved in standard pay levels, but not much more than that.

Not unionized[1], but this is something I'd accuse unions of.

[1]: because no uninon ever manages to not try to meddle in international politics. Gandalf in LOTR had it right: he did not want power because he knew he would be tempted to try to do a lot of good things.

This sounds like you're arguing workers should leave things to their "betters"...

I'm missing a "not" somewhere in there.

The way it stands the downvotes are deserved.

I'm personally not unionized but this is not something I would accuse the union of ;-)

? I've had a raise above 2% every year since I've come to Sweden in 2016. Our raises are determined on a scale based on performance. IIRC the average raise is negotiated by the union, but where on that scale you sit is determined by negotiation between you and your manager.

Edit: Sorry I might have misread your comment. I should say that our average increase was also above 2% several of those years.

Most of the collective bargaining agreements I've heard about here in the Netherlands involve an automatic inflation correction at the end of the year.

Actually, this is false. This used to be the case in the 70s, but after the Wassenaar Agreement[1], this was removed from nearly all collective bargaining agreements[2]. Some have salary grades that increase automatically by year of experience, but this isn’t the same, because it won’t increase the wages for people starting their career. In general, the stronger unions are able to negotiate salary raises above inflation[3], but this of course depends on the percentage of employees that actually join a union.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Agreement [2] https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/koopkrachtrepar... [3] I recently verified it for my own collective bargaining agreement, and on average, the raises were about 1% point higher than the inflation

But regardless, the wages still keep slipping against inflation.

I've never gotten a raise from organizing my workforce but I've gotten many by hopping jobs. Can you tell me more about the workplaces you've organized? How did you start to go about it?

Unions are overwhelmingly unpopular in tech, for good reason. Nobody wants to work with that incompetent unfireable employee who's protected, or getting paid the same as someone who produces half the results you do at the same level.

Unfortunately unions protect the incompetent and punish the successful (by refusing them the ability to negotiate). It's most pronounced in the heavy unionized industries like teaching and auto manufacturing.

There will always be developers who produce the results of 10, 100 or 500 developers single-handedly. Unions kneecap them, like they kneecap outstanding teachers by paying them the same as the teachers phoning it in every day.

Unions dont help new employees or high achievers. Unions help the ones with "the most time in".