Target raises minimum wage, provides $200 pandemic bonus

Now there’s another reason for us to love Target. The company is raising is permanently raising the starting wage for team members to $15 beginning July 5th—and frontline team members are getting a $200 bonus to thank them for their work during the pandemic.

This is important because (as the pandemic has really highlighted) jobs like these are so important—they are essential to our society. They’re also essential to families because plenty of people working at Target are parents.

This comes a year after Target announced the expansion of its parental leave and backup childcare options to hourly team members. This is huge because in the corporate world such benefits are often extended to salaried employees but not to part-time retail employees (who really need this, too). This takes it a step further than competitors’ policies which only offer paid leave to full-timers.

Previous to the parental leave announcement, Target team members who had a baby got two weeks of paid parental leave, but now that’s being doubled, so as of June 30, moms and dads who have just welcomed a new child will be able to take a month off work, and that’s “on top of the medical leave a team member receives after giving birth to a baby,” which CNN reports can be six to eight weeks.

So Target team members are seeing a huge improvement in family leave, but they’re also getting some help with childcare, which we all know is a huge issue for moms.

In the last year Target also doubled the amount it will reimburse parents for adoption or surrogacy fees.

Here’s the thing: Not every parent works in a cubicle. Some of us work in warehouses or behind cash registers, and that’s why parent-friendly policies cannot need to happen at all levels of corporate structures.

We hope that more companies follow Target’s lead here and understand that front-line workers are essential to the business, our society and to the next generation.

[A version of this post was originally published June 12, 2019. It has been updated.]