Walmart WMT,
joined a growing list of retailers raising employees’ wages to $ 15 an hour, but unlike opponents such as Target AT,
Amazon AMZN,
and Costco COSTS,
all of which now offer a base pay of $ 15 per hour for all employees, the country’s largest private employer will keep its starting salary at $ 11 per hour.
The salary increase at Walmart means that approximately 730,000 hourly employees will receive at least $ 15 per hour once the change takes effect, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said Thursday. This amounts to half of the employees per hour.
“I’ve been working for Walmart for 11 years, earning just $ 11.85, and most of our cashiers, along with hundreds of thousands of others, are being left out of the increases Walmart is giving,” said Mendy Hughes, a Walmart cashier. a statement released after Walmart announced the salary increase. Hughes is a leader at United for Respect, which describes itself as a national non-profit organization that is not a trade union. The group says it has successfully campaigned for Walmart to increase its starting salary in 2018 to $ 11 per hour.
“Being a cashier in the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most dangerous jobs out there,” she added. “Why is it so hard for the richest family in America to just do what they had to do years ago and increase the base payment for all Walmart employees to $ 15 / hour?”
The 730,000 Walmart hourly workers who will earn less than $ 15 an hour are hardly alone.
At chains, including Home Depot HD,
Dollar Tree DLTR,
Chipotle CMG,
Burger King QSR,
Kroger KR,
McDonald’s MCD,
and Chick-fil-A, cashiers all earn less than $ 12 an hour, according to Glassdoor, a website that collects anonymous salary information from current and former employees.
Also look at: What the minimum wage increases did to McDonald’s restaurants and their employees
“At Chipotle, we pay hourly workers above the federal minimum, and in some jurisdictions, employees are already paid $ 15 an hour,” said Laurie Schalow, chief corporate officer at Chipotle.
Among these chains, cashiers at Burger King and Dollar Tree earn the lowest, with an average hourly wage of $ 9.
McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Burger King have many franchise establishments across the country where the franchise owners determine employees’ wages, rather than the businesses themselves.
Dollar Tree, Burger King and Kroger did not respond to a request for comment from MarketWatch.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nearly 400,000 hourly workers in the U.S. earned exactly the current federal minimum wage of $ 7.25 per hour in 2019. Another 1.2 million workers earned below the minimum wage in that year, without taking into account tips, commissions and overtime. paid, reports the BLS.
President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers are urging to raise the federal minimum wage to $ 15 per hour and eliminate the minimum wage by June 2025.
As a result, some 17 million workers would increase their wages, according to a report published earlier this month by the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan federal agency.
The downside, however, is that 1.4 million workers could become unemployed as a result, according to the CBO’s average estimate. About 900,000 Americans would no longer live below poverty levels if a minimum wage of $ 15 per hour were set, the CBO estimates.
Biden disputes the CBO’s report during a Tuesday night town hall broadcast by CNN.
“There is just as much, if not more, evidence to suggest that it will grow the economy and benefit small businesses as well as large businesses in the long run and medium term, and it will not have such a widening effect. , “he said.
“But this is a debatable issue.”