Raising low salaries

Raising low salaries

McDonald's, Walmart and Target understand that recovery is also defended by increasing wages.

Big American companies consider that it's time to raise salaries. Not much, but enough for public opinion to receive the wave of optimism issued from the economic recovery. At the start, back in February, it was Walmart; then, Target, Walmart's competitor; now McDonald's pronounces itself, which is going to raise the salary per hour worked in its restaurants up to 9.9 dollars, that's 10%. TJMaxx and Marshalls. The salary starting point is low, but the arguments put forward to explain the rises matter, and a lot: there is recovery and that should turn into a reduction, even though testimonial, of inequality; growth is on a roll, unemployment diminishes, Janet Yellen is happy, and Obama has asked for the minimum wage to rise at least 10 dollars. These are general arguments; Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's's CEO has added another one very specific: his restaurants need motivated employees.

A great reasoning. Motivation is basic in competitiveness. Let's repeat it, for the record and so it's well understood everywhere: competitiveness doesn't improve lowering salaries or reducing employment, but, among other things, letting wage earners develop their work with the consciousness that they're well paid and they can aspire to be the best in their profession, with studies or without them. That idea doesn't touch deeply in that part of the Atlantic; incitements wind up in superior graduates. In the USA, they start from the beginning, or rather, from below.

Of course that —and these data are fundamental— union presence is low, social protection, scarce, and competitiveness, almost endless. In return, the enterprise is one more resource of global demand. McDonald's and Walmarts conceive that more salary is more demand and, therefore, more business, for them too. Expansion lives in the basement of the conscience; austerity lives in the European conscience's. Some popular psychologist ought to explain the European and American economic ways for the traumas caused by the Depression and the Hyperinflation. We are all slaves of our terrors.