How is it that inflation can affect everything EXCEPT wages?
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Wages do increase due to inflation but it’s more slowly than prices. The reason for that isn’t really corporate greed or unions (ask those folks from nations with strong unions if their wages are keeping up with prices right now). Wages go up slower than prices because they are negotiated less often. Unless you are doing gig work where the price gets set on every project, you probably negotiated or accepted your wage the day you started and only renegotiate once a year, if that. But EVERY TIME you walk into the grocery store to get milk, you are having a price negotiation. The grocer can raise the price on milk every day, heck every hour and you, for your part, can accept or reject that price (you’ll probably accept the price, but maybe start consuming less). So there are more opportunities for prices to change while wages rarely have the opportunity to go up. Most wage increases happen when people switch jobs, which doesn’t happen on the daily. In the US, real wages have increased more in last two years than they had typically been doing, in part because so many folks ended up switching jobs due to the pandemic economic shake-up.
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