Inflation double standards

Management seems to know all about inflation, except when it comes to our wages.  Here’s some fun quotes from the 2025 3rd Quarter Earnings New Release: https://static.conocophillips.com/files/resources/3q25_earnings_release.pdf

Both from page 2:

Quarterly dividend

ConocoPhillips raised the fourth-quarter ordinary dividend by 8% to $0.84 per share, payable Dec. 1, 2025, to stockholders of record at the close of business on Nov. 17, 2025. 

Major projects update

At the Willow project in Alaska, the company updated project capital guidance to $8.5 to $9.0 billion, primarily due to general inflation and localized North Slope and marine cost escalation. With Willow nearing 50% completion and the key milestones achieved to date, the company has narrowed expected first oil to early 2029.

So the company has enough free cash to raise the stock dividend by 8% and say that inflation has caused Willow to cost $1-2 billion more than they planned but for some reason they think your costs haven’t changed or aren’t important.  That 8% dividend increase is basically management giving themselves a nice hefty raise since they hold millions in shares.  But you?  Screw you. 

Here’s the kicker, even BEFORE this latest round of bullshit our wages had already been sliding since 2020.  Unfortunately the document and graphs I’ve been looking for may have been lost to time but here’s the summary: Inflation has far outpaced any of our wage increasing by a large margin. If our wages had kept pace with inflation since 2020 you'd be making 11% more right now than you currently are. In other words, management has already used inflation to trim your pay by 11% since 2020.  

So they trimmed their pay too, right?  Well…. Not exactly, the quarterly dividend was $0.42 a share in Oct 2019 and has steadily increased to $0.84 a share-  which makes the math pretty damn easy even for a dumbass sloper-  IT FREAKING DOUBLED.  So those tens of thousands of shares that our bosses get handed every year for all their hard work and brilliant decisions are paying out 200% more than in 2019 when they set our wages.   Yep… this is what corporate greed looks like-  they are trying really hard to tell you that you’re overpaid but they’ve literally doubled the payout they’re making off their stock options… I’d bet a pretty penny that their actual wages did a much better job of keeping up with inflation than ours over the same timeframe.  

But honestly, so much of their pay is in stocks, the wage part isn’t that important to them- they don’t give a rats ass what the 401K matching amount is, that's peanuts compared to their VCIP and stock options.

But the exact opposite is true for us-  our base pay hourly rate is the very foundation of our compensation- everything is tied to it-  your OT is a percentage of it, your 401K match, your VCIP, your STD, your LTD, your life insurance…. It goes on and on.  ANY stagnation or decrease to our base pay is a direct attack on our livelihoods.   These crooked bastards are trying to convince you that you’re overpaid by 22%, which we disproved here, while your buying power has actually DECREASED by 11% in just 5 years.  Have your electric bills decreased?  How about your flight costs?  Certainly your kids’ favorite cereal is 11% cheaper than in 2019…. Right?

The company knows all about inflation when it comes to project costs and stock dividends but not when it comes to your pay.   This wasn’t an accident, or an oversight, this is a determined effort to drag us down to L48 wages.  But we’re not in a L48 field and we’re not a L48 workforce.  The only way we’ll ever protect our wages is with a Collective Bargaining Agreement.