T-Mobile Sets Minimum Wage To $20, But With Caveats

Today T-Mobile announced that they will be raising their minimum wage to $20 per hour across the entire company. However, there’s a catch for some employees.

The news was shared today on the T-Mobile newsroom, and the post implies that all employees will have a base pay of $20 an hour. However, according to the internal email we received here at The T-Mo Report, quoted below, that $20 is actually the minimum take-home pay. This means that employees who already make the equivalent of $20 per hour after commissions and “spiffs” (a small bonus for selling a certain service or item) will not see much of a change.

The internal email does, however, state that Mobile Experts will get a 50 cent hourly increase in their base pay. Those base pays vary depending on tenure and location, but all Mobile Experts will see the 50 cent increase regardless of their current rate. Perhaps this will help ease the pain of extra work caused by walk-in customers who have ordered online.

Also mentioned is an upcoming annual compensation review taking place in January. Employees who are not Mobile Experts will be able to participate in that process.

Some employees, however, aren’t happy. One user on Reddit, who appears to at least be a store manager, complains that the rate increase isn’t enough. They state that the roughly 3.5% raise doesn’t come close to matching the rate of inflation for this year, and that competitors AT&T and Verizon have higher pay. The user also complained that T-Mobile did not share this information with employees early enough, sending the email mere hours before publicly sharing the news online. This didn’t give them enough time to discuss the pay changes with employees.

Whether a Mobile Expert or not, having a minimum take-home rate of $20/hr is pretty good, but it isn’t great compared to similar jobs. With all the businesses struggling to find workers due to low pay lately, T-Mobile is signaling that they are ready and willing to pay a fair wage.

According to the email, the changes are effective as of December 1st.