The Boss Who Put Everyone On 70K Salary, Crusader Against U.S. Inequality
Last edited Fri Feb 28, 2020, 12:38 PM - Edit history (1)
'The Boss Who Put Everyone On 70K,' by Stephanie Hegarty, BBC News, Feb. 28, 2020. Excerpts:
In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff - and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he's still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off.
Dan Price was hiking with his friend Valerie in the Cascade mountains that loom majestically over Seattle, when he had an uncomfortable revelation. As they walked, she told him that her life was in chaos, that her landlord had put her monthly rent up by $200 and she was struggling to pay her bills. It made Price angry. Valerie, who he had once dated, had served for 11 years in the military, doing two tours in Iraq, and was now working 50 hours a week in two jobs to make ends meet. "She is somebody for whom service, honour and hard work just defines who she is as a person," he says.
- Dan Price with his mother.
Even though she was earning around $40,000 a year, in Seattle that wasn't enough to afford a decent home. He was angry that the world had become such an unequal place. And suddenly it struck him that he was part of the problem.
At 31, Price was a millionaire. His company, Gravity Payments, which he set up in his teens, had about 2,000 customers and an estimated worth of millions of dollars. Though he was earning $1.1m a year, Valerie brought home to him that a lot of his staff must be struggling - and he decided to change that. Raised in deeply Christian, rural Idaho, Dan Price is upbeat and positive, generous in his praise of others and impeccably polite, but he has become a crusader against inequality in the US.
"People are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of, so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York with gold chairs. "We're glorifying greed all the time as a society, in our culture. And, you know, the Forbes list is the worst example - 'Bill Gates has passed Jeff Bezos as the richest man.' Who cares!?"
Before 1995 the poorest half of the population of the United States earned a greater share of national wealth than the richest 1%, he points out. But that year the tables turned - the top 1% earned more than the bottom 50%. And the gap is continuing to widen. In 1965, CEOs in the US earned 20 times more than the average worker but by 2015 it had risen to 300 times (in the UK, the bosses of FTSE 100 companies now earn 117 times the salary of their average worker).
...But Price did get a lot of flak. Along with hundreds of letters of support, and magazine covers labelling him "America's best boss", many of Gravity's own customers wrote handwritten letters objecting to what they saw as a political statement. The right-wing radio pundit, Rush Limbaugh, whom Price had listened to every day in his childhood, called him a communist. "I hope this company is a case study in MBA programmes on how socialism does not work, because it's going to fail," he said. Two senior Gravity employees also resigned in protest. They weren't happy that the salaries of junior staff had jumped overnight, and argued that it would make them lazy, and the company uncompetitive. This hasn't happened...
More, https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51332811
= new reply since forum marked as read
