Walmart WMT,
has joined a growing list of retailers raising employee salaries to $ 15 an hour, but unlike rivals like Target TGT,
Amazon AMZN,
and Costco COST,
all of which now offer a base salary of $ 15 per hour for all employees, the country’s largest private employer will keep their starting salaries at $ 11 per hour.
The pay rise at Walmart means about 730,000 workers per hour will receive at least $ 15 an hour once the change goes into effect, Doum McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive, said Thursday. This accounts for half of the company’s hourly workforce.
“I’ve been working at Walmart for 11 years and I only earn $ 11.85, and most ATMs, along with hundreds of thousands of others, are once again left out of the rises that Walmart gives,” said Mendy Hughes, cashier. Walmart in a statement released after Walmart announced the pay rise. Hughes is a leader with United for Respect, which describes itself as a non-union national non-profit organization. The group says it successfully campaigned for Walmart to raise the starting salary to $ 11 an hour in 2018.
“Being a cashier for the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most dangerous jobs out there,” he added. “Why is it so hard for America’s richest family to do what they should have done years ago and raise the base salary of all Walmart associates to $ 15 an hour?”
Walmart’s 730,000 hourly workers who will continue to earn less than $ 15 an hour are hardly alone.
On channels like Home Depot HD,
Dollar Tree DLTR,
Chipotle CMG,
Burger King QSR,
Kroger KR,
McDonald’s MCD,
and Chick-fil-A, all cashiers earn less than $ 12 an hour, according to Glassdoor, a site that collects anonymous salary information from current and former employees.
See also: What did the minimum wage increases do at McDonald’s restaurants and their employees
“At Chipotle, we pay our workers by the hour above federal minimums and in some jurisdictions employees already pay $ 15 an hour,” said Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s director of corporate affairs.
Among these chains, Burger King and Dollar Tree ATMs earn the lowest, with an average hourly wage of $ 9.
McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Burger King have many franchise locations across the country where franchise owners set employee salaries instead of the companies themselves.
Dollar Tree, Burger King, and Kroger did not respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that nearly 400,000 workers per hour in the United States earned exactly the current federal minimum wage of $ 7.25 per hour in 2019. Another 1.2 million workers earned below the minimum wage that year. , regardless of tips, commissions and overtime pay, the BLS reported.
President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers are pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to $ 15 an hour and eliminate the sloping minimum wage in June 2025.
As a result, some 17 million workers would see their wages increased, according to a report released earlier this month by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency.
The downside, however, is that 1.4 million workers could become unemployed as a result, according to the OBC’s average estimate. Some 900,000 Americans would stop living below poverty levels if a minimum wage of $ 15 per hour were enacted, according to the CBO.
Biden challenged the CBO report during a Tuesday night town hall broadcast by CNN.
“There is also, if not more, evidence that dictates that it will grow the economy and, in the long and medium term, benefit small businesses and large businesses, and that it would not have such a dilating effect,” he said. .
“But that’s a debatable issue.”