Walmart WMT,
has joined a growing list of retailers raising employee wages 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 an hour for all employees, the country’s largest private employer will keep its starting wage at $ 11 an hour.
The pay increase at Walmart means that about 730,000 hourly workers will receive at least $ 15 an hour once the change takes effect, Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO said Thursday. That equates to half of the company’s hourly workforce.
“I’ve been with Walmart for 11 years and making just $ 11.85, and most of us cashiers, along with hundreds of thousands of others, are again outside of the pay increases Walmart provides,” said Mendy Hughes, a Walmart cashier. released a statement after Walmart announced the pay increase. Hughes is a leader at United for Respect, which describes itself as a national non-profit organization that is not a union. The group says it has successfully campaigned for Walmart to increase starting wages to $ 11 per hour in 2018.
“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 should have done years ago and raise the base salary for all Walmart employees to $ 15 / hour?”
The 730,000 Walmart hourly workers who will continue to earn less than $ 15 an hour are not 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 site that collects anonymous salary information from current and former employees.
Also see: What did the minimum wage increases do to McDonald’s restaurants – and their employees?
“At Chipotle, we pay our hourly workers above the federal minimum, and in some jurisdictions, workers are already paid $ 15 an hour,” said Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs officer.
Of 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 locations across the country where the franchise owners set the wages of the employees, rather than 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 hourly workers in the US 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, disregarding 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 abolish the tipped minimum wage by June 2025.
As a result, about 17 million workers would see their wages rise, according to a report released earlier this month by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency.
The downside, however, is that according to the average estimate of the CBO, 1.4 million employees could become unemployed as a result. About 900,000 Americans would no longer live below the poverty line if a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour were introduced, the CBO estimates.
Biden contested the CBO’s report at a town hall on Tuesday evening broadcast by CNN.
“There is just as much, if not more, evidence to dictate that it would grow the economy and, in the long and medium term, benefit both small and large businesses, and it would not slow it down as much,” he said. .
“But that’s a debatable issue.”