The U. S. Senator accused the world’s largest retailer by sales of paying
Bernie Sanders spoke at Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, where he called for the world’s largest retailer by sales to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and give hourly workers a seat on the board of directors.
The Vermont Senator and presidential hopeful was invited to speak as a proxy for Walmart employee Cat Davis, who has worked at the company for 11 years. He was given three minutes to pitch his shareholder proposal in front of the company’s leadership.
“Walmart pays many of its employees starvation wages,” Sanders said from behind a podium at the meeting on Wednesday morning in Rogers, Arkansas. “Walmart can afford to pay its employees a living wage of at least $15 an hour. That is not a radical idea.”
While Walmart raised its minimum wage to $11 an hour in 2018, it has fallen behind its peers. Target is planning to raise its minimum wage to $13 per hour in 2019 and to $15 per hour by the end of 2020. Costco and Amazon have both recently raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Walmart was ready for Sanders’ appearance and CEO Doug McMillon spent much of the 30-minute meeting defending the company’s treatment of workers and touting the ways in which Walmart has invested in pay, benefits and training. He pointed to the $800 million in bonuses it paid to hourly workers last year, plus a tuition reimbursement program, an expanded, six-week paid maternity leave and a $5,000 stipend for adoption services. He noted that the company promoted more than 15,000 associates last year,57% of whom were women and 45% people of color.
He gave no indication that the retailer would budge on wages, but called for Congress to raise the federal minimum wage. McMillon said, “$7.25 is too low. It is time for Congress to increase the minimum wage,” reminding those in attendance that he started at Walmart in 1984 as an hourly summer employee.
Sanders has been a leading force in a growing political movement to pay workers a so-called “living wage,” which goes above and beyond the federal minimum wage and provides workers with enough money to pay their bills without having to take on a second job or lean on government assistance.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, another presidential candidate running for the party’s 2020 nomination, has similarly spoken out on the issue. “When I was a kid, a minimum wage job in America would support a family of three. It would pay a mortgage, keep the utilities on, and put food on the table,” she said at a speech on the campaign trail in January. “Today a minimum wage job in America will not keep a momma and a baby out of poverty.”
In an extremely tight labor market, where unemployment is at a 50-year low, competition is also driving retailers to raise wages in order to attract and keep employees.
