In a bid to comply with the passage of a D.C. Council bill, the Walmart U.S. company will be increasing the minimum wages in all its stores in 21 states beginning from or around Jan. 1, 2015.
As per an internal memo sent out to all managers of Walmart, the base salaries of employees at all the 1,434 stores spread across the U.S. will be adjusted accordingly, as the new bill passed recently demands that all employers pay their employees a living wage of $12.50 per hour.
In order to meet the requirement, the Walmart has decided against opening three additional stores in Washington D.C.
The wage hike, according to researchers, is likely to increase the hourly payroll of the company by $3.21 billion per year. As per Huffington Post, few researchers are of the opinion that the wage increase will not drastically affect Walmart. The store prices, according to them, will only increase by 1.1 percent even if the company decides to pass the complete cost on to their customers.
Twenty-one states have already begun following the new minimum wage with 13 tates increasing the wage in 2014 in contrast to 10 states in 2013 and eight in the year 2012. As per RT, the minimum wage increased 17 percent in South Dakota and two percent in Arizona.
As per the memo, the wage gap between the lower grade jobs such as cashiers, cart pushers, and maintenance from that of the more skilled employees like supervisors and associates will become much lesser. The pay grades of all those in the lower grade job category will be combined under the revised rule.
Complying with the minimum wage legislation will most definitely be difficult for Walmart, which has 1.3 million employees. Since the company mainly targets customers with low prices, it works on a very tight budget.
Now it remains to be seen how Walmart sticks to its decision of minimum wages, considering that it has been struggling ever since Americans with less income have lost jobs during the financial crisis.