Report: Whole Foods Employees Get $15 Minimum Wage, Company Immediately Cuts Hours
The employees of Amazon-owned Whole Foods are beginning to feel the negative effects of Amazon’s decision to enact a $15 minimum wage.
After receiving public pressure from figures like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Amazon announced late last year that they will be offering all of their employees a wage of at least $15, including employees at Whole Foods.
Whole Foods employees that were already making more than minimum wage also received a wage hike, according to a report by The Guardian.
It goes without saying that Amazon is a huge company — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is ridiculously wealthy himself with a net worth of over $137 billion — but the minimum wage increase still had a negative impact on Amazon-owned Whole Foods.
Bezos might have a lot of money, but stores like Whole Foods need to run on a budget, and the wage hikes have proved too costly to keep employee hours up.
A Whole Foods employee from Illinois provided The Guardian with schedules from November to the end of January proving that employee hours have drastically decreased since the wage hikes, even for full-time workers.
According to the schedules, “part-time employee hours at their store were cut from an average of 30 to 21 hours a week, and full-time employees saw average hours reduced from 37.5 hours to 34.5 hours.”
“My hours went from 30 to 20 a week,” the employee said. “We just have to work faster to meet the same goals in less time.”
Employees from multiple Whole Foods stores have reported similar phenomena to The Guardian.
“In Maryland, another Whole Foods worker said their regional management is forcing stores to cut full-time employee schedules by four hours, to 36 hours a week,” The Guardian reported.
According to the worker, the raise is “pointless” because employees are actually losing more because of the loss of hours resulting from the wage hike.
Another employee in Oregon said that “full-time team members are 36 to 38 hours per week now.”
“So what workers do if they want a full 40 hours is take a little bit of their paid time off each week to fill their hours to 40.”
Keep in mind that these devastating effects happened to a giant company that willingly gave their employees a $15 minimum wage.
And leftists want to implement a $15 minimum wage nationwide — such a policy would certainly kill locally-owned shops if it hit a giant like Amazon this hard.
The new socialist left, led by ideologues like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, spews “pro-worker” rhetoric, but their own policies end up hurting workers who see their hours cut.
Just look at how socialist policies work in countries like Venezuela, where shops are empty and some people are eating from trash bags on the street.
The left’s socialist policies should seem like a nightmare to everyday Americans.
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