That’s like Netflix telling you “hey we didn’t raise our prices enough to keep up with inflation, we’ll now charge you for last 5 year’s inflation in a single payment”
Who cares what these companies think is and isn’t fair? They created this inflation for the past years, they pay for it. And besides that, why do workers need to adhere to a past contract in their current demands? Continuing the strike for a one-time inflation-payment would have been the right choice for the workers, so the union should have done so.
Normally I’d agree with you that this sucks, but aren’t they hourly? Hours reduction means pay reduction. If I was hourly, I’d want the ability to work more hours (AND obviously a higher hourly rate to begin with)
Why does it need to be one or the other? That’s what capitalists want you to think. Why can’t it be an hour reduction and a pay increase together? That’s something that would be great for everyone. Only increasing pay or only decreasing hours is always going to split workers based on their current economic standing. Doing both not only strengthens all the workers, it also positively affects their companionship.
Yeah there’s been bad inflation, but minimum, mean and median wages have NOT increased nearly as fast as they should. Hell the minimum in the US has been unchanged for decades. And plenty of people still make minimum (or less in tipped jobs).
So because the minimum, mean and median wages have NOT increased nearly as fast as they should, we should… checks notes… not fight for better pay?
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet: this entire move completely fucks small parties in favor of the big one seen here. The German communist party (DKP) can’t participate at all in this election because they would need to register about 2000 signatures per district to even be allowed to run in those districts. And to add to that, the German system is designed in such a way, that parties get paid by their votes. Meaning that small parties would now need to spend a lot of money without any chance to crowdfund beforehand, and wouldn’t even get that back afterward. This entire move is just a way for the capitalists to realign their priorities with the big parties and make sure, that nothing stands in the way between their grab for even more power in the next years. For anyone who is interested in reading more about this, there is this really good article from the newspaper of the DKP (it’s in German, but you could just translate it using Google Translator or something): https://www.unsere-zeit.de/wem-vertraut-das-kapital-4798734/