Facebook has given its contractors a raise to $15 an hour. This is more than twice the national minimum wage in America of $7.25 per hour.
The company also announced that it will provide these employees a minimum 15 paid days off for holidays, sick time and vacation, and for those workers who don’t receive paid parental leave, a $4, 000 new child benefit for new parents.
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Facebook stated that this will give both women and men the flexibility to take paid parental leave, “an important step for stronger families and healthier children.”
Much has been said about the problems that low wage workers in America have just making ends meet. People say that minimum wage, which translate to about $15, 000 a year, is not nearly enough for anyone to live on.
People have been calling on America’s largest companies which rely on low wage workers, Such as McDonalds and Wall Mart, to pay at the very least $10 an hour.
But who thinks of Facebook when it comes to low wage workers? It’s a high tech company, isn’t it? It must pay all those white collar workers a competitive wage to keep them from jumping to Google or Microsoft.
Facebook is no Starbucks, so who exactly are all of these workers who will be getting a raise?
Well apparently Facebook uses a number of contractors and vendors who are considered outside staff and not in house full time employees.
In a blog post Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “We’ve been working on these changes for some months and had originally planned to announce this last Monday. Effective May 1, we’ve already put these standards in place for some of our largest support teams at our Menlo Park headquarters. We will be working to implement this program with a broader set of vendors within the year.
“This broader group will include workers who do substantial work for Facebook and who are employed by companies based in the US with more than 25 employees supporting Facebook.”
Let’s see now if other major companies in America will follow in Facebook’s example.
