WM guarantees 40-hour workweek pay for employees amid pandemic

Houston-based Waste Management CEO Jim Fish has indefinitely guaranteed 40-hour workweek pay for his 45,000 employees in light of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Yahoo Finance. 

“When I took the job back in 2016, one thing I said is we aren’t going to do any layoffs. And now it’s more important than ever. We have certainly protected the financial security of our 45,000 [employees],” Fish said on Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade.

Fish continued, “What we are doing is taking cost out of other parts of the organization. We have told our hourly employees they may have gotten more than 40 hours a week previously under the noncoronavirus environment and they are not necessarily guaranteed they will get those extra hours. But we are putting this 40-hour backstop behind them. What I didn’t want is to have our employees worrying [about] how they were going to pay rent or put food on the table. This kind of takes a huge weight off of their shoulders so they can do their jobs as well as they can.”

As for Fish’s second initiative tied to the coronavirus, he is lending a hand to the small businesses that are being hammered by the crisis. 

“For our small customers, we are going to commit to a month of free service to help them get their feet back on the ground," Fish said. "That’s a big financial commitment from our standpoint, but I think it bulls loyalty from those customers and they appreciate the fact we aren’t just there to charge them as soon as they get their feet back on the ground.”