If the cost of hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year has left you a bit stunned, you’re not alone. According to the New York Farm Bureau, there was a 26% increase in cost for the American traditional Thanksgiving meal. The agency examined the costs of pumpkin, sweet potatoes, and turkey. It also looked at other common items. This year was the largest year-to-year increase in Thanksgiving meals in its thirty-year-old annual survey.
Inflation is not just the unwelcome guest at the holiday dinner table; it will follow many of us to today’s Black Friday sales. The day after Thanksgiving — often fun for those who love bargain shopping — may be a subdued affair this year, and inflation is a major reason: people don’t have as much money to spend, and their discretionary cash won’t go as far.
While inflation has upended our usual Thanksgiving rituals — glorious feasting followed by blowout sales — it’s worth noting that America’s organized left has lagged behind our international counterparts in protecting workers from the damage. The labor movement in many countries has suggested a sensible solution to the problem: raise wages so that the living costs can be met.
The strikes by Bangladeshi tea- and garment workers over inflation were a major topic this spring/summer. Other striking workers during this period were South Korean truckers, who have since resumed the strike), Zimbabwean health care workers, and Tunisian public sector union workers.
The global protest movement has only intensified as it continues into autumn. Thousands of French workers took part in strikes and walkouts throughout the fall. This disrupted commutes to work on Paris Metro. Both public and private sector workers from Greece marched to strike and grounded planes and caused chaos by idling ferry ferries and grounding them. Belgian workers have taken part in national strikes. Workers in Spain engaged in mass protest, carrying signs demanding, “Salary hikes or social strife!”
Portugal’s public sector workers — from doctors to garbage collectors — staged a walkout last week, while Volkswagen workers in that country went on strike, all making the same demand. Thousands in Bulgaria, led by the country’s major trade unions, marched on the parliament building in Sofia, causing traffic jams, holding placards with slogans like “Inflation is rising, our salaries are not.” In South Africa, thousands of public sector workers went on a nationwide strike demanding a 10 percent pay hike to keep pace with inflation.
The strike by railway workers in the United Kingdom is expected to continue until the end of the holiday season. Air France employees are planning to cause disruptions in Christmas travel. Work stoppages are planned by other UK workers, both in the private and public sectors (ex. ExxonMobil included).
Though there are many other issues fueling the protests in Iran, inflation has played a role in major strikes and pensioners’ protests there, too.
Unfortunately, in the United States, where the inflation question has been entangled with partisan and ideological fights over last year’s Biden administration stimulus bill, the issue has been dominated by the Right. The cost of living was a topic that Conservative media extensively covered, particularly in the lead up to the midterm elections. However, the Right doesn’t have a solution for the increasing cost of living. Of course, you’ll never see Tucker Carlson standing with workers and asking for higher wages. Demagogues like him just like to use working people’s plight against Joe Biden.
For the same reason, inflation has failed to gel as a broad, cross-sectoral organizing issue for workers in the United States in the way it has abroad (though it has been mentioned in some recent US labor disputes, including the current strikes at University of California and the New School — both of which would be happening even without the recent rise in the cost of living, sparked as they are by years of poor conditions in academia), nor is it causing widespread disruption, bringing people into the streets, or unifying people against the bosses.
In addition to increased wages, peace could also improve the economy for common people. Global cost of living has increased due to the war in Ukraine. This is because it caused food and energy shortages all over the globe. Russia and Ukraine typically provide about a quarter of the world’s wheat and one-fifth of its corn, and the US Federal Reserve predicted back in April that the conflict would increase inflation around the world, which is exactly what has happened. The House Progressives sent a slightly worded message to Biden urging him to use all diplomatic options to stop fighting. A bipartisan chorus condemned them, and they withdrew it. It was also a wasted opportunity.
Building worker power and undermining the boss class is the only real answer to economic dislocations, so the lamentably weak state of the US labor movement has prevented the Left from capitalizing on the inflation issue — a problem so obvious that it follows us everywhere, from the Thanksgiving dinner table to the Black Friday sales at the mall the next day. In the next few months we may see American workers walking out on to the streets and joining those abroad.