In 2015, Walmart raised its starting wage for the first time since Sam Walton founded the company in 1962. The pressure to do so had been building for at least a decade from union organizers and other labor activists, the interfaith community, politicians, internal change agents, and the business realities of needing to turn around flagging sales by stemming employee turnover and improving customer service. In Still Broke: Walmart’s Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism, out today, Rick Wartzman tells the story of how Walmart came to raise its wages and offers insight into what it says about the company—and about America, where tens of millions of workers struggle to make ends meet.

On February 6, 2015, Walmart’s board of directors met in San Bruno, California. Doug McMillon, who’d become CEO the year before; Greg Foran, the head of U.S. operations; Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley; and Susan Chambers, the chief human resources officer, were finally ready to recommend an increase in the company’s minimum wage.

But even now—with all of the homework they’d done, with the great sense of urgency that they felt to rejuvenate store operations—McMillon and his team proceeded gingerly. “We were trying to balance everything,” McMillon said, “including earnings growth and the pressures of that.” Dan Bartlett, the company’s executive vice president for corporate affairs, would liken the calculus of attending to both workers’ needs and Wall...

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