Walmart to give 1.2 million hourly employees a raise

(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

last updated 21 January 2016

In February, almost every hourly Walmart employee in the United States will receive a modest raise, Walmart announced Wednesday.

Previously, Walmart said it would bump up its minimum wage to $10 an hour, and now, hourly workers employed as of Dec. 31 will receive a pay increase of at least two percent. The move is meant to appease longtime employees who say the company is more generous with new hires, and to slow down the high turnover rate, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The increase will affect almost 1.2 million Walmart and Sam's Club employees, and Walmart says the boost will cost the company about $2.7 billion over the 2016 and 2017 fiscal years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that retail workers in the U.S. earned an average of $14.95 an hour in December, up 3.6 percent from 2014, and with the planned raises, Walmart full-time employees are expected to make an average of $13.38 an hour. Tyfani Faulkner, a former employee who now leads OUR Walmart, a group dedicated to getting better wages and benefits for workers, told WSJ that it's a start: "At least they are recognizing that the longtime workers who are already making more than $10 need something. I still don't think 2 percent is enough."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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