Wells Fargo Accidentally Admits the Truth: The Republican Tax Bill Has No Connection to its $15 Minimum Wage

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Newscom via ZUMA

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Sucking up to Donald Trump is tricky business. On Wednesday Wells Fargo announced that it was raising its minimum wage thanks to the passage of the Republican tax bill:

Wells Fargo to Raise Minimum Hourly Pay Rate to $15, Target $400 Million in 2018 Philanthropic Contributions, Including Expanded Support for Small Businesses and Homeownership

Company announces initial actions to support economic growth with tax reform

“We believe tax reform is good for our U.S. economy and are pleased to take these immediate steps to invest in our team members, communities, small businesses, and homeowners,” said President and CEO Tim Sloan.

That press release is a little vague. Was Wells really doing all this because of the tax bill? A pair of LA Times reporters called the press office to find out:¹

Asked by the Times to clarify the connection Wednesday, Wells Fargo spokesman Peter Gilchrist said there was none….Asked directly to confirm that the pay raises were not a result of the tax bill, Gilchrist said, “That is correct.”

But wait:

On Thursday, Gilchrist backtracked. “We believe tax reform is good for our U.S. economy and are pleased to raise our minimum hourly pay to $15 as a result.” …He would not comment on the reason for the earlier statement.

Needless to say, Wells Fargo is in a heap of trouble these days over a series of scandals that never seems to stop, so flattering the president is just good business. Maybe it won’t help, but it can’t hurt.

In any case, I think we can take this as a case study in what’s really going on with all those companies announcing new initiatives thanks to the tax bill: they have nothing to do with the tax bill at all. It’s just business as usual. But they’re certainly eager to say it’s because of the tax bill. I suppose I would be too if I had a lot of business with the Justice Department or the SEC or the Pentagon.

¹Originally I had no link for this story, but now I do. After intense investigation, it appears that the latimes.com site automatically redirects me to beta.latimes.com, which doesn’t quite work yet and didn’t have this story available. That’s why I couldn’t find it. It’s not surprising for a beta site to have bugs, but it’s not clear why I’m unable to access the regular site.

Oh, and this is only on Firefox. It works fine on Chrome and Edge. I deleted all my latimes.com cookies, but that didn’t help. The investigation continues.

Later: I went in and removed all site-specific data for both latimes.com and beta.latimes.com. That did the trick.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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