Bank of America Corp. will boost its minimum hourly wage to $25 an hour by 2025 from a current $20, according to its Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan.
The move follows four years of pay increases that brought the company’s minimum wage to an hourly $20 in 2020 from $15. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender will also require its U.S. vendors to pay employees dedicated to the bank $15 per hour or more, Moynihan announced in an interview on CNN. Of more than 2,000 vendors with 43,000 employees, over 99% meet that threshold, the bank said in a separate statement.
“A core tenet of responsible growth is our commitment to being a great place to work which means investing in the people who serve our clients,” said Sheri Bronstein, chief human resources officer at Bank of America, said in the statement. “That includes providing strong pay and competitive benefits to help them and their families, so that we continue to attract and retain the best talent.”
Retail giants, fast-food chains, and ride-hailing companies are offering higher wages and cash payments to employees as the U.S. economy rebounds from the pandemic. Referral and signing bonuses, rarely needed before to fill entry-level, low-wage jobs, are now commonplace. These incentives represent a slow but steady march toward a goal that lawmakers and labor activists have pursued for years, with limited success: a higher minimum wage, approaching $15 an hour.
“This will have a wage pressure up the line—we’ve absorbed it for many years,” said Moynihan, and raising pay will add several hundred million dollars a year in costs for the bank. “The key is for big companies like ours, is to set a standard,” he told CNN.