Yeah, I did a double-take when I got to the part about expected wage increases for 2014. I suspect it's much worse now, and was interested to see what Forbes was printing about that as at least these days they're notorious for posting stuff with an anti-labour focus. I can't imagine they'd post an article like this these days.

That said, I'm sure this article is more relevant than ever now and it's a damn travesty that this is what the labour market has come to since the 70s/80s.

I'm on the executive team for a small business that my family bought almost two years ago. Many of us had worked there for years beforehand and absolutely weren't paid what we were worth. As soon as we took over, we started to raise wages across the board (other than sales, who are our own little 1% due to the structure we inherited). Wages are still far from where we'd like them to be, but we're trying our best with the resources at hand while we navigate these first few years of ownership. Shit's not easy for a lot of small businesses and I get that many small business owners are outright taking advantage of their staff. We actively try not to (granted, in the Marxist sense we inherently are) but I realize that most of our staff deserve more than we can currently afford to pay them.