Wal-Mart Becomes an Unexpected Leader in Parental-Leave Policy
Wal-Mart's New Parental-Leave Plan Vaults It Ahead of Starbucks
(Bloomberg) -- Lost in the wave of publicity surrounding Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s decision to raise its minimum wage to $11 an hour was perhaps an even bigger announcement: The company is instituting one of the most generous parental-leave policies in the U.S.
The nation’s largest private employer said on Thursday that full-time hourly workers will receive 10 weeks of maternity leave at full pay. Fathers and partners will be eligible to take six weeks. The company had previously granted as much as eight weeks of maternity leave to hourly workers, but only at partial pay, and didn’t offer any benefit to dads, adoptive parents or same-sex couples.
The new policy applies to more than half of Wal-Mart’s more than 1 million non-salary employees.
Long criticized by labor activists and others for the way it treats its employees, Wal-Mart will now become one of the leaders in providing parental leave. Only about 6 percent of U.S. low-income workers have access to such a benefit, according to Paid Leave for the U.S., an advocacy group. A quarter of new moms are back at work just 10 days after childbirth, and people who make $75,000 a year are twice as likely to get paid leave than people who make less than $30,000, the group found.
Wal-Mart’s policy is now more robust than that of Starbucks Corp., long considered a leader on benefits for hourly workers. The coffee chain offers six weeks of full paid leave to moms and 12 weeks of unpaid leave for dads and partners.
“For decades, Wal-Mart has set the ‘floor’ for worker wages and benefits in America, and today they lifted that floor and transformed access to parental leave for low-wage working people across the country,” Katie Bethell, executive director of Paid Leave for the U.S., said in a statement.
--With assistance from Rebecca Greenfield and Matthew Boyle
To contact the reporters on this story: Matt Townsend in New York at mtownsend9@bloomberg.net, Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan at jgreen16@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, Mark Schoifet
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