JPMorgan Chase's Dimon vows to raise wages

The CEO of the nation’s largest bank said Tuesday he’ll raise the company’s minimum pay for thousands of employees by at least 18%, including bank tellers and customer service representatives, in a vow to address growing concerns about income inequality.

“A pay increase is the right thing to do,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in an op-ed that appeared in Tuesday’s New York Times. “Wages for many Americans have gone nowhere for too long.”

Dimon added that the banking giant will also step up in-house training and funding of national programs to bolster career-oriented education.

The base pay for 18,000 employees, now $10.15 an hour, will rise to $12 to $16.50 an hour over the next three years, depending on geographic and market factors, Dimon wrote.

He acknowledged that the move will help the company “attract and retain talented people in a competitive environment.” With the nation’s unemployment rate at 4.9%, companies increasingly are being forced to raise wages to lure fewer available workers and prevent employees from leaving.

Dimon is the latest CEO to respond to a growing national movement to address wage stagnation and the wealth gap. The past couple of years, companies including Walmart, McDonald’s, IKEA, Nationwide Insurance and Facebook have announced minimum pay increases, while about half the states have boosted their minimum wages. New York, California and several cities have agreed to lift their pay floors to $15 an hour over the next five years or so. On Monday, Starbucks announced that all of its employees would get at least a 5% raise.

Average annual earnings across the country have risen a tepid 2% for several years, according to the Labor Department, barely keeping pace with inflation, though other measures have shown faster increases.

Dimon also said the company will spend more than $200 million this year to train thousands of entry-level employees in consumer banking, allowing it to train 30% more workers than it did last year. Such training, he wrote, has helped more than 40% of tellers get promotions into higher-paying jobs within five years.

JPMorgan Chase also plans to spend $325 million on career-oriented education more broadly. It will provide 10 states with up to $2 million each to strengthen and expand such training in school systems for well-paying jobs that don’t require a bachelor's degree.

Many companies scaled back training and development during and after the Great Recession. In recent years, employers often have complained of a skills gap because many job candidates lack the qualifications for their open positions. That's partly because thousands of employees laid off in the recession lack updated technological and other skills.

“We face many challenges,” Dimon concluded. “But they can be overcome by government, business and non-profit sectors working together to build on models of success that advance economic opportunity and create more widely shared prosperity.”