The Baltimore Sun somehow forgot to include Hobby Lobby in its profile of regional businesses who have elected to pay their employees more than the minimum wage, Get Religion pointed out Monday.
The piece, “U.S. Retailers Raise Minimum Wage Ahead Of Schedule,” lauded five major companies as “ahead of the gradual curve of a new law that will raise the state minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by July 1, 2018.”
The current Maryland minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
Ikea, the company with the highest starting wage mentioned in the piece, will start its College Park, Maryland employees at $13.20 an hour beginning in January. Hobby Lobby, which has four locations in Maryland, starts its full-time workers at $15.
“There is no reason that the Sun team had to include Hobby Lobby in this timely trend story,” wrote Terry Mattingly, director of the Washington Journalism Center. “However, there are a number of good reasons to do so, starting with the obvious news hook of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that touched on a related issue — benefits.”
Hobby Lobby also continues to offer to cover a variety of birth control for its employees, having objected to only four of the sixteen FDA-approved methods.
In addition to starting employees at over twice the federal minimum wage, Hobby Lobby also gives all employees Sundays off and donates 10 percent of its profits to charity.
This isn’t the first time the Sun has drawn criticism for its Hobby Lobby coverage.
A Monday letter to the Sun from an irritated reader complained, “in what can only be construed as a deliberate effort to spread misinformation.. the Sun announced that the Hobby Lobby decision exempted contraceptives. … The Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case was confined specifically to exempting some employers from having to pay for medications or procedures that terminate a pregnancy after conception. The medications and procedures exempted are not contraceptives, since contraceptives are, by definition, designed to prevent conception.”