Some good

To the editor:

I was pleasantly shocked that some Walmart employees now make good salaries (“Walmart workers score more perks,” The Chief, June 7). It was no surprise that most of them still receive poverty wages.

When hourly wages range from $19 to $45, but the average hourly wage is a little under $18, most of the workers are obviously still not well-paid. This is a 30-percent increase over five years ago. That shows how badly the workers were paid then. The meager $350 to $1,000 annual bonuses do not compensate for this.

Now Walmart is not the only offender in this area. But they and Amazon tend to be who I think of when it comes to Scrooge-like, anti-union companies. Both are owned by those who are among the richest people in the world, so they can afford to do better.

Whenever there is talk of raising the minimum wage or actually doing it, $18 to $20 an hour is usually what's on the table. But those are still poverty wages.

More reasonable would be $30 an hour, and that's only $62,400 a year. You might get by on that if you can find affordable housing, not the easiest task in New York City.

But the state legislature has shown no interest in anything near that. As for the Republican-infested Congress, getting them to raise the federal minimum above $7.25 seems as likely as getting Marjorie Taylor-Greene to act human.

Richard Warren