Workers and customers learned about the store closures on the same day Walmart drew praise from the White House for raising pay and giving out worker bonuses because of the new lower corporate tax rate.
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Walmart is the world’s largest retailer in the country and has more than one million employees.
Sam’s Club membership fees – which cost $45 annually – will be refunded to customers affected by the closings, according to the BI report. Target raised its wage to $11 for hourly employees in October 2017, with the goal of reaching $15 by 2020. According to Bloomberg, an employee who’s worked at the company for 20 years or more will be eligible for that $1,000; a worker at the company between 10 and 14 years could be rewarded $400.
Walmart employs more than one million hourly employees. The benefit includes a $5,000 financial reimbursement for expenses paid to adoption agencies, translation expenses and other legal costs associated with the adoption.
Walmart is the latest company to share its expected tax savings from the tax overhaul – following similar announcements from Boeing, AT&T and Wells Fargo.
After the passage of the tax bill, AT&T also promised thousand-dollar bonuses to employees and later announced it would lay off over 1,000 workers in 2018.
Walmart now pays $9 per hour for workers in training, with that wage rising to $10 once training is finished. That’s higher than the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Adam Jones, an economics professor at UNC Wilmington, said the increase in minimum pay isn’t surprising. But I came away convinced that McMillon, in partnership with Walmart chairman Greg Penner, has adopted a significantly different approach to worker pay than his predecessors.
The big-box giant said Thursday that it will raise its minimum wage in February to $11 per hour and pledged to give one-time bonuses to eligible employees of between $200 and $1,000. Salaries workers would also receive six weeks of paid parental leave.
An expanded parental and maternity leave policy, providing full-time hourly associates in the USA with 10 weeks of paid maternity leave and six weeks of paid parental leave.
A call to Sam’s Club in South Tampa at 5135 S. Dale Mabry Highway returned a voice recording that said the store is closed Thursday, Jan. 11, but would reopen Friday.
In some cases, employees were not told their store about their stores’ closing before they showed up to work on Thursday, Business Insider reported. Shuttered stores were reported across the country, including four in NY and one in Alaska.
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BJ’s, one of Sam’s Club biggest rival, said it has also seen “an immediate increase in Sam’s Club members” since Wal-Mart announced the closing 63 locations spanning from NY to Puerto Rico.
