"Inflation is at 20-40% per year, so here's a whopping 3.3% to show you that we care about our employees!"
While the government is probably also trying to increase taxes or regulations to extort even more money out of the employer so eventually they'll need to shut down their business or go more and more digital because they don't need to pay a salary to robots and computers, or like they've been doing by sending jobs overseas.
Yes, without bitcoin, hope would be at an all time low!