[ad_1]
Costco has approximately 180,000 employees in the United States, and 90% of them work by the hour. He will raise his minimum wage to $ 16 starting next week, Chief Executive Officer Craig Jelinek said Thursday during a hearing by the US Senate Budget Committee on worker compensation at large companies.
The move comes as Democrats in Congress seek to rally support for a federal minimum wage of $ 15. Senator Bernie Sanders is the driving force behind the current push in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, introducing a bill last month to raise it to $ 15 by 2025. President Joe Biden has also backed a minimum wage of $ 15. The federal minimum wage has stood at $ 7.25 an hour since 2009, but a growing number of cities and states are increasing their minimum wages.
Costco (COST), based in Issaquah, Wash., raised its minimum wage to $ 14 in 2018 and $ 15 in 2019. The company says 20% of its hourly workers earn minimum wage.
More and more retailers and restaurant chains are also switching to a minimum rate of $ 15 an hour. Amazon (AMZN) increased his starting salary to $ 15 in 2018, while Target (TGT) and Best buy (BBY) increased their minimum to $ 15 last year. Walmart (WMT), the largest U.S. retailer, has a minimum wage of $ 11, and it said last week that it plans to increase the wages of about 425,000 employees, a quarter of its workforce, to at minus $ 13 an hour.
Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who studies minimum wage, said Costco’s move would pressure rival employers such as Amazon to hit its minimum of $ 16.
Although some companies have gone to $ 15 an hour or more, many business leaders oppose a federal minimum wage of $ 15. Some employers, especially small businesses, have fought against increasing the minimum wage to $ 15, saying it could lead to layoffs and even closures.
In a letter to congressional leaders on Wednesday, the business roundtable first suggested that the minimum wage hike should be tied to progress in tackling the coronavirus pandemic.
Also on Wednesday, Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for retailers, said on a call with reporters that “it doesn’t make sense for the federal government to focus on dictating wages. in an economy as large and diverse as this … It is better to let market conditions dictate “wages”.
—CNN’s Tami Luhby and Matt Egan contributed to this article.
[ad_2]
Source link
