CoxHealth bumps minimum wage

As minimum wages role back in St. Louis following action from Gov. Eric Greitens, one Springfield company is preparing to raise its pay.

CoxHealth will boost minimum compensation to $9.50 an hour - with a bump to $10 per hour after six months - from its current $8.08 an hour. With more than 11,000 total employees, the move a year in the making will affect 36 percent of its workforce, or about 4,000 people.

"This is an investment in our most important asset: our people," said Andy Hedgpeth, vice president of human resources, in a news release. "If we can invest and make people's lives better, that's what we want to do."

Beginning Aug. 6 for the Aug. 25 pay period and retroactively for current employees, the health care system expects the change will help recruit and retain employees and reduce turnover. According to the release, about 70 percent of CoxHealth's total turnover is in positions affected by the change and about 40 percent of current vacancies will be affected by the adjustment.

System leaders say this is latest step in an ongoing effort to recruit and retain a top-quality workforce. Leaders have dedicated more than $3 million to the plan, which will make CoxHealth's introductory compensation highly competitive with nonhealth care entry-level positions in the community, according to the release. Hedgepeth said the system is on budget for $571 million in annual salaries this year.

"We've recently made a large investment to recruit and retain clinical staff and this is the expansion of that same approach to our support staff," said Eric Maxwell, director of compensation, in the release. "It can be tough with the budgets and the resources we have, but we've worked hard to benefit employees while being fiscally responsible for the system."

CoxHealth says its current $8.08 per hour wage is on par with other hospitals across the state and it stands above Missouri's minimum wage of $7.70.

Last month, Greitens supported legislation that blocks cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage, enforcing the Missouri standard statewide and forcing the city of St. Louis to roll back its minimum wage from $10.

"Our state needs more private sector paychecks and bigger private sector paychecks," Greitens said in a statement. "Politicians in St. Louis passed a bill that fails on both counts: it will kill jobs, and despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people's pockets."

Minimum wage rates have been a hot-button issue nationwide over the past several years. Last March, California Gov. Jerry Brown agreed to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022, following suit with cites such as Richmond, Virginia, and Seattle. The national minimum wage currently is $7.25 an hour and President Barack Obama sought to raise that amount, but met pushback from Congress. In 2015, he signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour.

In 2016, a National Employment Law Project report looked at every federal minimum wage hike since 1938 and found year-over-year employment increased 68 percent of the time after each wage hike.

"We strive to be an exemplary employer and we are continually challenging ourselves to set a high standard for our community," CoxHealth President and CEO Steve Edwards said in the release.