And higher wages are not unheard of: In Denmark, McDonald’s workers earn $20 an hour, which is working well for management and the corporation.īut with the federal minimum wage at $7.25, between 25% and 40% of the American labor force struggles to make ends meet. “Corporate America will never move far enough or fast enough on its own.”Īt $20 an hour, a full-time worker earns a little more than $40,000 a year - it’s not a lavish lifestyle, but enough to support a family, Wartzman says. “If you look at Wal-Mart - the biggest employer in the country - it’s both a source of this problem and a symbol of something bigger,” he says. Corporations can potentially serve as a lever for social change because they control a large piece of the economy, Wartzman writes, but Wal-Mart isn’t going far enough.Īn hourly wage of $17.50 an hour adds up to $33,000 a year - which isn’t a living wage anywhere in the U.S., Wartzman says. Now, Wal-Mart pays its workers an average wage of $17.50 an hour. That’s slightly more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, which hasn’t been raised since 2009. “Investing in workers became a business priority.”īack in 2015 when the company started raising wages, Wal-Mart paid workers an average of $7.65 an hour. The churn was so high: people just coming in the door and then quitting in a hurry,” he says. But the main reason, Wartzman says, was the impact of cutting labor costs to the bone from 2011 to 2013. In 2015, Wal-Mart started raising wages after facing pressure from unions, politicians, journalists, faith leaders and city councils, who denied the company expansion into certain urban areas. “Those workers really struggling to make ends meet and couldn’t certainly support a family,” he says. In Texas, the company failed to pay out an estimated $150 million in wages.īack then, Wartzman served as business editor at the Los Angeles Times when a team of journalists reported a Pulitzer Prize-winning deep dive into “the high human cost of low prices.” In the early 2000s, former employees across the country sued Wal-Mart for cheating them out of millions of dollars in overtime pay. In his new book, “ Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism,” Wartzman argues that the government needs to step in and mandate a $20 minimum wage. Roughly one-third of the country lives in precarious financial circumstances, Wartzman says. Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist and author Rick Wartzman took a deep dive into the nation’s biggest employer: Wal-Mart. The Fight for $15 movement advocates for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for workers - but is that enough to live on in the U.S.
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