The region’s largest employer has decided to raise its starting wage to $15 an hour in five years. Whether UPMC was moved by outside pressure or by its own needs to maintain a talented workforce hardly matters — it’s good for Pittsburgh.
When any sizable company, whether Wal-Mart on a national scale or UPMC in Western Pennsylvania, improves compensation for workers, it’s a big deal. Not only does it help a large number of employees, many with children or other dependents, but it also signals to competitors and other employers that fair treatment of workers is good business. The region’s largest health care network employs 62,000 people.
Although UPMC chief human resources officer John Galley asserted that the nonprofit “actually felt zero external pressure” to raise wages, the truth is the health system has been peppered by steady criticism, including informational pickets at its Downtown headquarters, over its wages and its resistance to union-organizing drives. With clergy, public officials and employees keeping the heat on for better pay, it’s disingenuous for UPMC to be so dismissive.
The Wage Review Committee spearheaded by city Councilman Ricky Burgess reported in December that wages paid by the city’s chief health care employers — UPMC and Allegheny Health Network — were “insufficient to allow hospital workers to live in even modest comfort in Pittsburgh.” Mr. Galley said then that talk about raising hourly wages to $15 was “a red herring” and due to a union-organizing campaign, “not because our wages are below market or the health care industry averages.”
Three months later, UPMC wants to make $15-an-hour a reality.
The health system says its average starting salary in the city is $11.73 an hour. An increase of $3.27 by March 2021 would represent a jump of 28 percent. Presuming low inflation in the next few years, that would make a difference in a lot of paychecks.
Partisans on both sides can spin it however they want, but a raise is still a raise.
First Published: March 31, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
