Cost Of Living Raises

The march of inflation, the rising of prices, entails that the same numeric amount of money would over time have a diminishing ability to purchase the same goods or services.  Thus, an employer who never alters compensation in response to inflation is in effect paying employees less and less for the same work.  This could be due to anything from negligence on their part to utter premeditated malice, as they might hope this practice goes unchallenged so that they can continue paying less in a sense each year.  The numbers paid might stay the same, but the worker sufferers or is exploited even if they do not feel the impact of lacking cost of living adjustments (sometimes called COLA), and the company will likely increase its own prices to safeguard a stable profit one way or another.  It just might not allow employee wages/salaries to increase in proportion to this.

On one hand, this kind of employer would not have to part with a higher amount of their revenue in paying employees livable wages, or at least compensation that does not decrease in purchasing power as the cost of living increases along with inflation.  On the other hand, desperation on the part of workers, including that of seeing their buying power crumble, can absolutely work out in a cruel or selfish employer's favor.  The workers might be driven to the point of exhaustion by frantically trying to hold onto whatever miserable job they have, in the process losing the energy and resolve to search for new employment.  Workers with the flexibility to search for new jobs or who have multiple jobs are in a stronger position when it comes to resisting the dictates of an asinine employer: they do not rely or need to rely on the one job so heavily.

The more an employer denies or neglects cost of living raises, the more the purchasing power of their workers erodes, and the more in need of money they become, save for particularly well-off individuals.  Even then, they are being taken advantage of by those above them, those who have the power to ensure an employee's labor is rewarded at a consistent level of purchasing power and fail to do so.  Companies that withhold cost of living raises on purpose to inspire dread or passion around performance-based appraisal for raises are exploitative and founded on stupidity.  Of course, there is no such thing as infinite room for improvement, not as far as a person's individual capacity is concerned, yet this is often held up as the supreme metric for raises.

It is logically impossible for someone to always improve their output with the same amount of time and the same technological means of accomplishing this.  Then there is the fact that any raises actually awarded might still inadequately reflect the real level of effort on the worker's part or their level of seniority or centrality in the company.  Labor is seldom rewarded in accordance with the real relevant factors: whatever is livable in that place and time (at a full-time level at minimum), personal skills and seniority, and the fact that someone is giving up part of their life for a mere job.  Avoiding cost of living raises is utterly incompatible with the nature of the first factor and is very disrespectful towards the other two as well.

This is one of the many potential ramifications of pretending like workers are only a burdensome expense on a business, a necessary "evil" in that they deprive owners of even greater profits.  An employer who misunderstands employees to be parasites that contribute little to nothing while always demanding more does not understand logical necessity as applicable to business--workers are utterly vital to expanding and sustaining the scope of a company!  To adjust compensation to match a shifting cost of living is to protect the livability of a job and make it appealing to current and prospective workers.  It is also to treat people as what they are, which is more than a means to the end of enriching an employer, to be appeased with whatever scraps will barely mollify them.