Raphael Stevens

Walmart is raising its minimum wage to $14 an hour for store employees.
Starting in early March, the retailer’s U.S. average wage is expected to be more than $17.50.
The company, which is the nation’s largest private employer, is also sweetening its college tuition program and creating more high-paid roles at its auto centers.

An employee arranges beauty product gift boxes displayed for sale at a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location in Los Angeles, California.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Walmart said Tuesday it is raising its minimum wage for store employees to $14 an hour, representing a roughly 17% jump for the workers who stock shelves and cater to customers.
Starting in early March, store employees will make between $14 and $19 an hour. They currently earn between $12 and $18 an hour, according to Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield.

With the move, the retailer’s U.S. average hourly wage is expected to be more than $17.50, Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner said in an employeewide memo Tuesday. That’s an increase from an average of $17 an hour.
About 340,000 store employees will get a raise because of the move, Hatfield said. That amounts to a pay increase for roughly 21% of Walmart’s 1.6 million employees.
The retail giant, which is the country’s largest private employer, is hiking pay at an interesting moment. Weaker retail sales trends have prompted companies, including Macy’s and Lululemon, to recently warn investors about a tougher year ahead. Some economists are calling for a recession amid persistent inflation and shifting consumer habits.
Prominent tech companies, media organizations and banks, including Google, Amazon and Goldman Sachs, have laid off thousands of employees and set off alarm bells. Still, the jobs market has remained strong. Nonfarm payroll growth slowed slightly in December, but was better than expected. And the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week.
So far, retailers have largely avoided job cuts. Instead, they continue to grapple with a tight labor market. And they have a workforce that, like other Americans, is feeling the pinch from pricier food, electricity and more.

Retail, compared with other industries, tends to have higher churn than other industries — which allows employers to manage their head count by slowing the backfilling of jobs, said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY Parthenon, the global strategy consulting arm of Ernst & Young.
Yet he said retailers may also be planning cautiously. For the past 18 months, they have had to work harder to recruit and retain workers. If they lose too many employees, he said, hiring and training new employees can be costly.
“Any retailer is going to have to think carefully and think twice about laying off a good share of their workforce,” he said.
In Walmart’s employee memo, Furner said the wage hike will be part of many employees’ annual increases. Some of those pay increases will also go toward store employees who work in parts of the country where the labor market is more competitive, the company said.
Walmart is sweetening other perks to attract and retain employees, too. Furner said the company is adding more college degrees and certificates to its Live Better U program, which covers tuition and fees for part- and full-time workers. It is also creating more high-paid roles at its auto care centers and recruiting employees to become truck drivers, a job that can pay up to $110,000 in the first year. 
The wage hike lifts Walmart’s average pay to around the industry average, but it remains below several other major retailers, according to Just Capital, which partners with CNBC on an annual ranking of America’s largest publicly traded companies on issues that reflect priorities of the American public.
Target, Amazon and Best Buy have all raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour. Amazon and Target, however, were behind Walmart in rolling out their own debt-free college degree programs in 2021.

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The FDA proposed new lead limits in baby food.
Lead exposure can impair brain development and the nervous system, resulting in learning disabilities, lower IQ and behavioral difficulties.
The FDA’s proposed lead limits are not legally binding on the industry.
But the FDA said it would use them as a factor in deciding whether to take enforcement action against a company for selling contaminated food.

Jgi/jamie Grill | Tetra Images | Getty Images

The Food and Drug Administration proposed new limits Tuesday on lead in baby food, in an effort to reduce exposure to a toxin that can impair childhood development.
The lead limits apply to processed food consumed by children younger than two years old. In a statement, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said the limits would reduce lead exposure from these foods by as much as 27%.

The proposed lead limits are not legally binding on the industry, but the FDA said it would use them as a factor in deciding whether to take enforcement action against a company for selling contaminated food.
The agency proposed the following lead concentration limits for baby food:

10 parts per billion for fruits, vegetables, yoghurts, custards and puddings, mixtures, and single ingredient meats. This would reduce exposure by 26%.
20 parts per billion for root vegetables. This would reduce exposure by 27%.
20 parts per billion for dry cereals. This would reduce exposure by 24%.

Lead is toxic and particularly dangerous for young children. It can impair brain development and the nervous system, resulting in learning disabilities and behavioral difficulties.
Lead exposure through food among children ages 1 to 3 has declined 97% since the 1980s, according to the FDA. Though progress has been made over the years, the agency launched an effort in 2021 to reduce the levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury in children’s food to the greatest extent possible.
Food consumed by children can contain lead due to contaminated water or soil, industrial activity and old lead-containing equipment used to make food, according to the FDA. The agency said it’s not possible to completely remove lead from the food supply, but the limits should push industry to take measures to reduce its presence as much as possible.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee slammed concert giant Live Nation in a hearing on Tuesday.
Industry witnesses described a monopoly-like control over venues, artists and consumers.
Criticism of Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, intensified after a botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

Amy Edwards demonstrates against the live entertainment ticket industry outside the U.S. Capitol January 24, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images

The Senate Judiciary Committee slammed concert giant Live Nation on Tuesday, calling on activists and artists to speak to competition in the ticketing industry following a botched sale of Taylor Swift tickets in November.
Led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who helms antitrust investigations for the committee, senators grilled Live Nation’s chief financial officer, Joe Berchtold, about the company’s dominance in the ticketing business. Industry witnesses described a monopoly-like control over venues, artists and consumers.

“Ticketmaster should look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m the problem, it’s me,'” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said, playing off Swift song lyrics.
Blumenthal said Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that something needed to be done. But they appeared to diverge on a path forward, with several Democrats seemingly open to establishing new legislation to help address the issues, while antitrust subcommittee ranking member Mike Lee, R-Utah, blamed what he deemed lax enforcement of existing laws.
Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticket seller representing around 70% of all sold tickets in the U.S. It also owns concert venues and promotes tours, leading many opponents to call its business a monopoly in the industry.
Live Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, has faced longstanding criticism about its size and power in the entertainment industry. Opponents intensified their complaints in November when presale tickets for Swift’s Eras Tour were plagued by disruptions and slow queues.
Live Nation was supposed to open up sales for 1.5 million verified fans ahead of general public ticket sales. However, more than 14 million users flocked to the presale site, including bots, spurring massive delays and site lockouts. Ultimately, 2 million tickets were sold during the presale and the general public sale was canceled, company representatives said.

“For the leading ticket company not to be able to handle bots is, for me, an unbelievable statement,” said Jerry Mickelson, the chief executive of Jam Productions, during Tuesday’s hearing. “You can’t blame bots for what happened to Taylor Swift. There’s more to that story that you’re not hearing.”
Swift, who has worked to bring all marketing in house, publicly slammed the company at the time for mishandling the sales process, albeit without mentioning it by name.
The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation’s practices, however, that probe predates the Swift ticket sale fiasco.

Live Nation Entertainment President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold and SeatGeek Chief Executive Officer Jack Groetzinger listen as Jam Productions Chief Executive Officer and President Jerry Mickelson speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment” on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 24, 2023. 
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

Berchtold testified Tuesday that the company owns around 5% of U.S. venues and said Ticketmaster has lost, not gained, market share since its merger with Live Nation.
Clyde Lawrence, a singer and songwriter for the band Lawrence, called out Live Nation’s control over different aspects of the business, saying that at the end of the day the company is “negotiating to pay itself.”
Lawrence told lawmakers that if his band plays a Live Nation venue, they are required to use the company as the promoter and must sell tickets through Ticketmaster. That often comes at a higher upfront cost and lower back-end splits than with a third-party promoter, he said.
Lawrence also spoke to a lack of transparency in added ticket fees that he said, on average, range between 40% and 50% of the base ticket price. Berchtold on Tuesday said venues set the fee percentage, but agreed his company could be more forthcoming about that information.
Berchtold also highlighted what he said is the growing problem of ticket scalping.
Tuesday’s hearing extends a bipartisan focus on antitrust action by senators in recent years.
At the end of last year, lawmakers managed to pass a bill that would raise merger-filing fees on large transactions, boosting funds for federal enforcers who review those deals. Klobuchar, who sponsored the bill, referenced that legislation in her remarks Tuesday as a way to help those agencies challenge potentially anticompetitive deals.
Still, Congress has failed so far to pass some of the more ambitious pieces of legislation that would create new guardrails on competitive practices, specifically in the tech space. Despite bipartisan support, the impasse shows how difficult it can be update or add to existing antitrust laws, which many lawmakers feel are not sufficiently enforced by the courts as currently written.
The Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger was approved by the Department of Justice under the Obama administration, with certain stipulations that the newly merged company agreed to uphold, under what’s known as a consent decree. It required Live Nation to comply with certain requirements, like not retaliating against concert venues that used a different ticketing company, for a set period of time.
In 2020, Live Nation and the DOJ agreed to update the consent decree and extend it to 2025, because the DOJ said the company took actions that it viewed as violating its earlier agreement.
The current antitrust enforcement regime under the Biden administration has made clear it much prefers structural remedies, or breakups, to behavioral ones like consent decrees.

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Life sciences and medical diagnostics company Danaher (DHR) reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the fourth quarter. We view the dip in the stock as unjustified and an opportunity. Revenue increased nearly 10% on a core basis to $8.37 billion, well above estimates of $7.9 billion, according to Refinitiv. Adjusted profit increased 6.7% to $2.87 per share, exceeding the consensus estimate of $2.54 per share. When excluding the impact of declining Covid testing sales — but keeping in revenue from products that support vaccines and therapeutics — Danaher’s base business saw core growth of 7.5%. That shows the company isn’t overly reliant on the bump in pandemic sales. Bottom line This was a solid quarter from one of the best-run companies in the world. With very little to nitpick, we attribute Tuesday’s 3% stock decline to a combination of management already preannouncing the results and shares making a large move into the print. Also to blame: first-quarter guidance may be a tad light versus expectations. Given in-line to better-than-expected quarterly results pretty much across the board along with operating margin expansion and strong cash flow generation, we’re inclined to view Tuesday’s selloff as a buying opportunity as noted by our 1 rating — especially considering that the full-year guide is also in-line to better-than-expected. DHR 1Y mountain Danaher (DHR) 1-year performance Management said on the post-earnings call that the first quarter is expected to be the low point for their bioprocessing non-Covid core growth as customers work to repurpose existing inventories. In other words, that bioprocessing inventory glut that’s pressured the life sciences industry in recent months appears to be coming to an end, at which point growth stands to reaccelerate. Guidance Management expects overall core revenue growth to be down mid-single-digits on a percentage for the first quarter. After adjusting for an expected “high-single to low-double-digit” impact related to Covid testing, vaccine, and therapeutics sales, the team is forecasting base business core revenue growth to be in the mid-single-digit percent range. The operating profit margin is expected to be roughly 30% — ahead of the 27.7% expected. For the full year 2023, management expects overall core revenue growth to be down mid-single-digits. After adjusting for an expected “low-double-digit” impact related to Covid testing, vaccine, and therapeutics sales, the team is forecasting base business core revenue growth to be in the high-single-digit range. The operating profit margin is expected to be roughly 31% — ahead of the 27.3% expected. Though we don’t have an exact comparison because of the change in how management is calculating growth going forward (more details on that below), the first quarter guide appears to be a bit light of what some analysts were modeling and likely the cause of at least some of Tuesday’s selling pressure. The full-year guidance, however, appears to be in-line to slightly better than analysts were expecting. On the call, management said they now anticipate Covid-related vaccine and therapeutic revenue will be “approximately $150 million for the full year of 2023, down from approximately $810 million in 2022 and lower than our previous expectation of $500 million.” The reasons: lower vaccination and booster rates along with the availability of alternative therapeutics (other than monoclonal antibody-based treatments). Reporting Structure Before digging into the results, we want to highlight that management has slightly modified Danaher’s reporting structure. As a result of significant growth in Life Sciences in recent years, the team has opted to separate out a portion of the original segment into a new segment called Biotechnology. In order to provide an apples-to-apples comparison to Wall Street estimates, we combined the sales and operating income of the new Biotechnology and Life Sciences segments in the table below in the Product Segments section. Additionally, starting with the first quarter 2023 results, management is updating its base business core revenue growth definition to exclude the impact of Covid-related testing and the impact of Covid vaccine and therapeutic revenue streams. This is reflected in the guidance section provided above. Previously, only revenues related to Covid testing were excluded. On the call, management pointed to roughly 10% core revenue growth in both North America and Europe. In China, a surge of infections as the Chinese government did away with its zero Covid policy hampered performance in the company’s clinical diagnostics business there as patient and testing volumes declined. This dynamic is expected to last through the first quarter before “gradually recovering through the balance of the year.” Additionally, the team attributed Danaher’s profit margin expansion to “disciplined cost management, productivity measures and price actions implemented to help offset the impact of inflationary pressures across [the] business.” Management also noted that while supply chain issues remain, they are seeing “modest improvement in component availability.” It’s also worth noting that Environmental & Applied Solutions (EAS) revenue was up 5.5% on a core basis driven by high-single-digit growth in Water Quality related sales. (These figures are not in the table.) The EAS division is expected to become a separate company later this year. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long DHR. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.

In this photo illustration, Danaher Corporation logo seen displayed on a smartphone with the stock market information of Danaher Corporation in the background.
Igor Golovniov | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Life sciences and medical diagnostics company Danaher (DHR) reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the fourth quarter. We view the dip in the stock as unjustified and an opportunity. More

Large business centers including New York City and the states of California and Washington have introduced salary transparency measures in recent years.
Experts believe these laws will address pay equity issues.
The rise of pay transparency laws could shrink net wage growth over time as an unintended consequence, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research report.

The rise of pay transparency laws in the United States could change how the nation’s workers negotiate their annual salaries in today’s fast-changing labor market.As layoffs mount in the face of recession fears, the increased number of job seekers will be seeing more positions in states that mandate pay ranges be publicly listed.Colorado became the first state to require public disclosures of salary ranges in 2021. Now jurisdictions including Washington state, California, and New York City have taken up similar mandatory public disclosure laws. These measures typically affect businesses with at least a small number of employees.Experts believe the arrival of these laws could mark a tipping point in the long-running fight for wage equity.”When Colorado required that, in the immediate aftermath, there were some companies that tried to get a little cute and in their postings said, you can do this anywhere in the country except Colorado,” said Emily Martin, vice president of Education & Workplace Justice at the National Women’s Law Center. “You can’t really do that when you have industry leaders like New York and California requiring this.”
The rise of these pay transparency laws could boost wages for minorities and women, who may be paid less than their peers. The pay gaps derive from many factors including job preferences and inexplicable discrepancies.But a growing body of research also says that the movement could dampen wage growth over time. “What we found is that people get smaller raises,” said Bobak Pakzad-Hurson, an assistant professor of economics and entrepreneurship at Brown University.Nuances of rising pay transparency were highlighted in a report Pakzad-Hurson co-authored in the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? In some sense, I think we have to weigh these trade-offs,” he said in an interview with CNBC.Watch the video above to learn more about the rise and potential implications of pay transparency.

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