You Gotta Live

The "cost of living increase" was a brilliant scam to disguise the insidious effects of inflation.  The powers that be convinced the masses that each year they had to work harder and get bigger raises just to maintain their standard of living.
That flies in the face of common sense. Every year we come up with more efficient ways to build better products. Technology improves, allowing us to make more goods more quickly while consuming fewer resources and taking less working hours. According to the laws of supply and demand that means the consumer should enjoy more and cheaper goods.
That was the result during the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, where food and goods became cheaper and more plentiful. Why is that not the case today? Because the government intercepts these gains.  By printing more money to finance deficit spending, they create inflationary pressure causing prices to rise.
In some cases like the tech field, the downward pressure of innovation is able to overcome inflationary pressures, but in other areas that are more stagnant (notably oil and food) we see prices continue to rise.
This is not the "cost of living" it is the cost of inflation created by government debt and the working class bears the burden most of all. The sooner people realize there is no free lunch the sooner we can work to change this pattern and return the fruits of progress to the People.

Bad, Productivity! Bad!

Are Workers Too Productive?

Increased productivity is exhausting the workers?  Yet the source of the increase in productivity is tools which multiply the effects of their labor... which creates more output for the same effort. Really?  Yeah, that doesn't quite jive when you think about it...

You can find similar doom-and-gloom predictions in historical documents from the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution (and I'll bet all the way back to the Bronze Age "Woodcutters will be WAAAAY too productive!"). Times of change often result in displaced workers, which eventually frees up enough people to shift into new or expanding industries. Productivity in one area or another may create saturation in that particular market, but I can't believe that we've exhausted the capacity of human demand. First, that doesn't mesh well with accusations of "boundless capitalist greed" and it also conveniently ignores large parts of the world where people's wants and needs for goods and services are certainly not being met.

The big factor here is globalization. Localized industries (like retail and other services) remain little changed, while easily transferred industries (like manufacturing and export) shift to developing countries. But with 15% annual salary growth in India, how long do you think it will remain profitable to shift jobs there? The short term impacts are unsettling, but the long term result will be more countries with populations that produce things that we want and that want things we produce. The alternative is to condemn entire nations of people to living in squalor and subsisting on handouts: much better to allow them the dignity of work.