I work in the IT industry in a non-Western country. Recently the inflation has really been felt by everybody and the employees are getting more and disgruntled by the fact that our wages are not adjusted for inflation and the pay increases quite often are below the inflation threshold.
However, all of our attempts at bringing up this issue to the company leadership has been met with “company is also affected by the inflation, so we cannot afford to pay you more”. Obviously that does not sit well with me. I am not an economic major, but from what I have heard, the current inflation seems to be affecting mainly basic necessities, like food, which are not a huge part of mostly remote IT company's expenses.
But maybe I am wrong, if that's the case I'd like to hear about that as well. In general though, I am looking for talking points which we could use to counter our employer's rhetoric and hopefully put enough pressure on them, so they split with us, what's in our opinion, more of a fair share of the profits.
(Don't worry, our plan is not to just “own then with facts and logic”, we are looking into other ways of pressuring the employer as well – this is just an addition to other things that we are doing.)