Opinion
Shop Floor
For two years, American workers have been running on a treadmill. They are tired, and they are not imagining it.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ measure of real average hourly earnings, which adjusts pay for inflation, stood at $11.23 in October 2024, in 1982-84 dollars. In October 2026, it stood at $11.26. Three cents of progress in two years. Over the 12 months ending in September, it fell from $11.32 to $11.26. Prices rose 6.9% over two years, The Washington Inquisitor reported, and paychecks just about kept up. Production and nonsupervisory workers, the people who build, stock, drive and clean, saw average hourly pay rise from $30.48 to $32.75, according to the BLS.
Meanwhile the bills kept coming. A Washington Inquisitor analysis published today of Energy Information Administration data found that the typical household’s monthly electric bill rose from about $147 to about $166 over two years, and in the District of Columbia from about $117 to about $166, a 43% jump in the price per kilowatt-hour.
My colleague on this page this morning argues that the fastest raise is a lower price, and that Congress should clear the way to build more power. On the building, we agree. I want permitting reform that gets transmission lines and power plants built by union crews at prevailing wages. I also welcome the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, under which the biggest technology companies promised to “fully cover the cost of increased electricity production” for their data centers. If it is enforced, it will help.
But lower prices are a promise about the future. Rent is due on the first. And there is no law of economics that says the savings from cheaper power or cheaper goods flow to the people doing the work. Workers get their share when they have the power to ask for it.
Look at who is getting ahead right now. About 12,000 steelworkers at Cleveland-Cliffs reached a tentative four-year agreement last week with cumulative base-wage increases of more than 18%, including 5% this year, plus a $4,000 lump-sum payment, the United Steelworkers told its members. Members still have to ratify it. That outpaces the inflation of the last two years. Those raises were not handed down by a market. They were bargained across a table by workers who could credibly say no.
Look, too, at who is fighting for it. At Harvard, the Harvard Academic Workers union, which represents non-tenure-track researchers and other academic employees, went on strike this week after talks failed to produce a contract, Inside Higher Ed reported. The university’s latest offer included a 3.5% raise on ratification and a 1% bonus, according to the union. The union is asking for raises of 7% to 12%. One of the richest institutions in the world is offering its researchers half of what two years of inflation took.
Then there are the workers with no table at all. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 2009, according to the Labor Department. Every year Congress leaves it there is a pay cut for the lowest-paid workers in states that have not set a higher floor of their own.
The free-market answer is that the labor market is tight and employers will compete for workers. Unemployment was 4.1% in October, and that is good news. But a tight labor market has been paired with flat real wages for two years. If competition alone delivered raises that beat inflation, the BLS line would not be flat. Workers need leverage that does not disappear when the economy cools.
So here is a labor agenda for a Congress that says it cares about affordability.
First, build, and build union. The permitting bill moving through the Senate should carry prevailing-wage and apprenticeship standards for the projects it speeds up, so the jobs created by faster approvals are good ones.
Second, make the Ratepayer Protection Pledge binding. A voluntary pledge is a press release. A tariff rule that makes large new users pay for the power they need, enforced by regulators, protects every family’s bill. The Energy Department has backed that idea before federal regulators; Congress should write it into law.
Third, raise the federal minimum wage and index it to inflation, so the lowest-paid workers never again wait 17 years for a raise.
Fourth, protect the right to organize. When academic workers at the country’s richest university have to strike to win a contract, the system for winning recognition and a contract is too slow. Penalties for stalling should be real.
Lower prices and higher wages are not enemies. A worker who wins a raise and pays less for power is doubly better off. But only one of those depends on decisions made in a boardroom or a utility commission. The other depends on workers themselves. After two years on the treadmill, they have earned the right to step off it, and they will do it the way working people always have: together.
Frank Mulcahy is the pen name of a Washington Inquisitor opinion columnist writing from a labor rights perspective. The views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Washington Inquisitor.
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