The pay hikes won by labourers at Honda and Foxconn are unusually big.
Many big American employers use a two-step approach to pay hikes.
Statistics indeed remain static; pay hikes are rare and involve a bellyache.
These pay hikes may reflect the increase in their bargaining power as China's workforce begins to thin out.
The money for the pay hikes will be taken from the 2016 bonus pot, which starts accruing next month.
At the same time, however, senators set up a commission to consider pay hikes for all government branches, including themselves.
In the past few weeks some of the biggest companies have announced pay hikes for elite salaried workers.
The pay hikes follow a period of wage freezes during the financial crisis, points out Tao Wang of UBS.
A year later, during the playoffs, he called a strike that led to pay hikes and better working conditions.
Mr de Blasio's approach is to give city workers huge backdated pay hikes and hope that Wall Street, which pays the bills, never has a bad year.
But on August 25th around 1,000 of Macau's dealers and servers took to the streets to demand pay hikes and better working conditions.
