According to keynesianism wages can not go up when there is high unemployment. And because of this, they argue, prices wont go up much, because any upward presure will meet people having stagnant wages. This is their explanation of why printing money in a depression is ok. But reality begs to differ.
The problem with the stated above is that they are looking at the economy through aggregates, which is a horrible way of looking at the economy and leads to big mistakes. What happens in reality is that not all workers are competition for the rest of the workers. For example, a guy with experience on the housing industry that is now unemployed is no competition for a engineer working at Google, therefore when the Google engineer negotiates his next increase it does not affect him much that there is a lot of construction workers unemployed or not. Thats why in the last year we have seen a lot of the more skilled workers getting better wages, even in the face of high unemployment.
Now the raise in wages is starting to move onto less skilled workers and its the first evidence for the wave of high inflation that we will see.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/08/first-significant-hint-of-wage-price.htmlFirst Significant Hint of Wage Price Inflation Beyond Silicon Valley
U.S. trucking companies may face a 30 percent surge in wage bills by 2014 as rising demand for freight shipments threatens to push the industry’s driver shortage to the longest on record, reports Reuters.
Aside from Reuters technical error on "shortages" (There are no such things when markets are allowed to clear), this is a very interesting data point. Up to now, the strongest wage gains have been seen for highly skilled specialist software engineers in the Silicon Valley area. Upward pressure on trucking wages indicates developing wage inflation in the blue collar sector.
Company-employed drivers, who don’t own their rigs, earn average salaries in the mid-$40,000 range, based on figures from Norita Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Owner-Operator Independent Driver Association in Grain Valley, Missouri, according to Reuters.
But, forget the 2014 forecasts. Here's what is going on right now, according to Reuters:
Saia Inc. said this month it would increase wages by 2.5 percent for drivers and many other employees.
J.B. Hunt’s spending on wages, salaries and benefits rose 12 percent last quarter from a year earlier.
Bottom line: Price inflation, as expected is starting to spread. At some point, it gets real ugly.