Home Depot will minimum wage to $15 in February

Home Depot is spending $1 billion to raise its hourly minimum wage to $15. The move, announced Tuesday, should help the building-supply company compete with retailers Walmart and Target, which recently raised their minimum wages to attract employees in a job market where unemployment is low while inflation is high.

“This investment will help us attract and retain the best talent into our pipeline,” company CEO Ted Decker told employees in an email.

Home Depot employees 437,000 workers in its 2,000 U.S. stores and 34,000 people in Canada, where the wage hike also applies. Unemployment in the U.S. is at its lowest since 1969.

The company’s current average minimum wage was not made public in Tuesday’s announcement. Starting minimum wage for Walmart store employees is $14, where workers average $17.50 an hour. Payscale.com says Home Depot field service technicians are Home Depot’s top paid retail workers, while a “paint associate” can expect to earn the company’s lowest average hourly rate.

Nearly 200 Home Depot workers in Philadelphia, Pa., voted against unionizing in November after petitioning to do so in September for the first time in the company’s 44-year history.

Home Depot reportedly recorded $3.36 billion in profits during the final quarter of 2022, but company execs anticipate business will slow in 2023 as pandemic lockdowns abate and rising interest rates hit the housing market. The company’s stock went into decline — dropping nearly 20 points — following news of higher wages and lower financial expectations.

GlobalData manager Neil Saunders told the Associated Press, “After a year of defying gravity, the slowing economy and pressures on consumers have finally caught up with Home Depot.”

While demand for retail workers is high, tech industry jobs are drying-up nationwide. Google parent company announced 12,000 job cuts in January days after Microsoft said it would shed 10,000 salaries. Meta, which owns Facebook, cut 11,000 jobs in late 2022, when Amazon announced its intentions to put 10,000 employees out of work.

Home Depot boasts its “the world’s largest home improvement retailer with approximately 500,000 orange-blooded associates and more than 2,300 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.”

Wage hikes announced Tuesday made no mention of its stores in Mexico.

With News Wire Services