Home Depot announced a $1 billion investment in wage increases for U.S. and Canadian hourly employees Tuesday. The home improvement giant said every hourly employee will receive a raise effective this month.
Moving forward, Home Depot will pay at least $15 per hour in all markets. The Atlanta-based company is the latest major company to try to attract hourly employees via a minimum wage increase. Walmart recently announced it would raise the starting average salary across all of its stores to $17.50. And last year, Target announced a $300 million investment toward wage increases across all of its stores.
Home Depot’s wage increase comes amidst a fledgling unionization attempt in Philadelphia, which the store opposes. Local workers in that market claimed employees weren’t sharing in strong sales and that stores were routinely understaffed. The first attempt at a unionization election failed to pass last November after representatives filed in September.
Home Depot employs about 437,000 people in the U.S. and 34,000 in Canada, almost all of which are hourly. The company owns 2,000 stores in the states and 182 stores in Canada.
“This investment will help us attract and retain the best talent into our pipeline,” Home Depot’s Chairman, President and CEO Ted Decker wrote in an email to employees. He also noted that 90% of Home Depot’s leadership started as hourly workers, themselves.
Home Depot, like many businesses, is actually having trouble finding enough labor to staff their stores
During an appearance on Fox Business’ Varney & Co., Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus said he is concerned about the “woke generation” running the economy.
“I certainly don’t want to see the woke generation coming up,” Marcus said in January, specifically referring to the trend of unlimited currency printing, which he thinks will just continue in perpetuity. “We’ve already overspent. And if anything, climate control has caused most of the [fiscal] problems we have today.”
He boiled down his thoughts succinctly: “today [all we talk] about is woke diversity, things that don’t hit the bottom line.”
Not only does the fiscal irresponsibility negatively affect U.S. citizens in the form of rampant inflation, but it also affects businesses’ ability to hire both unskilled and office labor. When monetary policy gets out of control, and businesses lose sight of profitability, eventually the system trickles into a socialist-adjacent society.
“You can’t hire people,” Marcus declared. “They don’t want to work. Nobody wants to work anymore, especially office people. It’s incredible. How do you have a recession when you have people that don’t want jobs?
“The government, in many cases, if you don’t work, you get as much money as when you did work… And so you get this laziness and entitlement, and it’s basically a socialist society.”
