In January, Alan Brynjolfson, founder and CEO of Tampa-based Volt Lighting, decided to pay his employees a wage of at least $20 an hour, doubling Florida’s minimum wage. He didn’t like the idea of his employees living close to the poverty line at a time when costs of living were going up.
“A lot of my employees were only making $30,000 a year, and there’s no way you can live on that. They’d need to be living with multiple people to split costs,” Brynjolfson, whose company manufactures outdoor lighting products, said.
Brynjolfson is far from alone in hiking compensation as a combination of a worker shortage inflicts staffing woes on businesses across the country, and record-high inflation squeezes household budgets.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor show more than 11.4 million vacancies in April 2022, up from 9.2 million a year ago and a 59% increase compared to pre-pandemic levels. Retail trade vacancies were at 1.1 million, up from 838,000 a year ago. In turn, wages are rising and pushing up the cost of doing business: the employment cost index for private industry, which tracks cost of labor, saw a 4.8% increase in Q1 2022, the highest going back at least 10 years.
Nationwide, retail employers pay $17.71 per hour, with total cost of compensation reaching $23.11 when taking benefits into account, according to June 2022 BLS data. But this is less than $38.61 cost of compensation rate across all private workers. Before the pandemic, September 2019 data show the total...
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) will pay more than $17 million to settle allegations it violated federal anti-discrimination rules tied to government contracts, the U.S. Department of ...