Bank of America Making its Minimum Wage $20 an Hour

Whether you like it or not, the minimum wage is slowly climbing higher and higher. The latest company to succumb to the issue of “wage inequality” among its employees is the Bank of America. Starting on May 1st, the hourly minimum wage will be $17 an hour, over the next couple of years the bank plans on raising that to $20 an hour.

“If you get a job at Bank of America, you’ll make $41,000” a year, Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan said on Tuesday. “With the success our company has … we have to share that success with our teammates.” ^[1] Maybe Moynihan is using an increase in minimum wage to boast the success of the company, maybe he’s really trying to share his success with his “teammates,” or maybe he’s about to testify before the Democrat-led House Financial Services Committee in Washington.

Whatever the case may be, Moynihan, along with six other banks CEOs, are all scheduled to testify in front of the Democrat-led House Financial Services Committee in Washington on Wednesday. One of the most significant issues in the 2020 election happens to be minimum wage- especially income inequality.

Raising the minimum wage among employees might be enough to soften any blows the Financial Services Committee might have to give Moynihan when they see the wage gap between his bank tellers and his upper-level employees.

In 2017 Bank of America raised its minimum wage from $13.50 to $15 an hour. However, CEO Moynihan received a 15 percent raise that year as well, which was about $26.5 million.

Lately, big companies in the private sector have been ahead of the curve when it comes to minimum wage, Amazon, Costco, and Target have all experienced minimum wage increases in the past couple of years, which land their minimum wage around $15 hourly, even though the federal minimum wage is less than $8 an hour.