Chris Bryant, Columnist

Inflation Is Soaring. So Where's My Pay Raise?

Workers, not companies, bear the brunt of inflation. Indexation is the great new economic divide.

Squeezed.

Photographer: Hannibal Hanschke/Getty Images Europe
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When consumer prices began soaring last year, a trade union representing staff at the European Central Bank demanded their wages increase in lockstep with inflation.

This grassroots effort to index pay to price increases was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was incendiary stuff coming from the supposed guardians of euro-area price stability. Indexation, after all, can determine who is shielded from inflation — and who suffers from it.