15 Feb Why is this statement correct The top issue I would negotiate during a labor agreement is Cost-Of-Living-Adjustments (COLA). COLAs are used to go up when purchasing power goes dow

Why is this statement correct
The top issue I would negotiate during a labor agreement is Cost-Of-Living-Adjustments (COLA). COLAs are used to go up when purchasing power goes down (Fossum, 2014). The U.S. labor market has recently rebounded from the pandemic, and while wages grew at 3% before the pandemic and doubled after, it does not compensate for the current inflation (Glick, Leduc, & Pepper, 2022). The consumer price inflation was 1.4% in January 2021 and 9% in June 2022. Employees’ real wages or purchasing power have eroded by at least 3%. In the last 50 years, there has been a decline in unionization and little evidence of automatic cost-of-living adjustments in long-term wage contracts.
I am a federal employee, and generally, the President will announce a federal pay raise toward the end of the year. On December 23, 2022, the President announced a 4.1% pay raise (Friedman, 2022). With the National consumer price index in 2022 falling between 7.59 and 12.27%, my purchasing power went down dramatically (Federal Planning Bureau, 2023).
The second issue that I believe should be negotiated is work schedules and locations. During the pandemic, employees were told to work from home. Now that the pandemic is winding down, companies demand that employees return to work. Employees have spent the last two years finding new ways to work part-time from home. Employees not only have to spend extra time and effort commuting to and from home, but they are also still concerned about the health risk that the pandemic imposes (Zilber, 2022). Some employers are finding that working from home includes less commute stress, improved inclusivity, and increased productivity and performance.