Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture

POSTED BY: kpo
UPDATED: Sunday, March 8, 2026 22:53
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MAGONSDAUGHTER

Monday, August 3, 2015 10:29 AM

Interesting, Switzerland is a European country that I really struggle to admire.

JO753

Monday, August 3, 2015 4:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
To be really blunt, if the Swiss are rich today partly because of Nazis stealing Jewish wealth, then Americans should be fabulously more wealthy than the Swiss because of Europeans stealing the wealth of Native Americans.

The US iz fabulously more wealthy than Switzerland. Yes, badly ditributed, and not all directly derived from stealing the Injunz land, but still, your point haz problemz.

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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

JO753

Monday, August 3, 2015 5:13 PM

More WF Buckley:

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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

SECOND

Monday, August 3, 2015 6:13 PM

Look at the CEO at Gravity Payments, a Seattle credit card processing firm. Dan Price is raising the minimum wage at Gravity in stages over three years to $70,000 per year. Price knows he would be wealthier and his life easier if he did not. Reading through the story and it is clear that Price came from a different culture than the typical American CEO. Switzerland has a different culture, too. www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/business/a-company-copes-with-backlash-agai
nst-the-raise-that-roared.html

America's Top 1% hope Dan Price's business fails. That hope is all you need to understand. The 1% say they are not hoping for failure, but that is not true.

As for other business leaders in Mr. Price’s social circle, they were split on whether he was a brilliant strategist or simply nuts. As much as they respected him, they were also disturbed. “I worry how that’s going to impact other businesses,” said Steve Duffield, the chief executive of the DACO Corporation, who met Mr. Price through the Entrepreneurs’ Organization in Seattle. “We can’t afford to do that. For most businesses, employees are the biggest expense and they need to manage those costs in order to survive.”

Mr. Canlis, a co-owner of his family-named restaurant, told Mr. Price the pay raise at Gravity “makes it harder for the rest of us.”

Roger Reynolds, a co-owner of a wealth management company, said his discussion of the pay plan with Mr. Price got heated. “My wife and I got so frustrated with him at a cocktail party, we literally left,” said Mr. Reynolds, who complained that Mr. Price unfairly accused him of measuring his self-worth solely in terms of money and trying to hold somebody else down.

Imagine American business being more like Swiss business. There would be more stories like this one:

Mario Zahariev, who runs Pop’s Pizza & Pasta, switched to Gravity after seeing Mr. Price on the news. When he learned his monthly processing fees would drop to $900 from $1,700, Mr. Zahariev decided, “I was not going to keep the difference for myself.” He used the savings to raise the salaries of his eight employees.

Pop’s Pizza aside, Mr. Price’s plan is not easily replicated, said Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist and an early promoter of the city’s $15 minimum wage law. Still, he noted, “These individual acts can create a new kind of perception of what’s possible and what’s righteous.” After all, he said, two years ago, no one would ever have guessed higher minimum wage laws would be catching fire in cities around the country. “Who can tell what that last thing is that catalyzes big change?”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

1KIKI

Tuesday, August 4, 2015 1:53 AM

I hear you on that one!

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Interesting, Switzerland is a European country that I really struggle to admire.

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

JO753

Tuesday, August 4, 2015 4:28 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Look at the CEO at Gravity Payments, a Seattle credit card processing firm.

Its really amazing that a company that haz no actual product and only a 2nd hand connection to customerz uv the money shuffling industry can pay its employeez so much.

And you never hear rite wingerz saying 'cant afford to pay executivez so much', its alwayz 'you hav to pay that kind uv money to attract good talent'.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

SECOND

Thursday, August 6, 2015 5:47 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Look at the CEO at Gravity Payments, a Seattle credit card processing firm.

Its really amazing that a company that haz no actual product and only a 2nd hand connection to customerz uv the money shuffling industry can pay its employeez so much.

And you never hear rite wingerz saying 'cant afford to pay executivez so much', its alwayz 'you hav to pay that kind uv money to attract good talent'.

239 Years Ago, Adam Smith Predicted Fury of Seattle Business at CEO Who Pays Workers Well
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/239-years-ago-adam-smith
-predicted-anger-seattle-business-ceo-pays-workers-well/

Dan Price, the CEO of a small Seattle credit card processing company called Gravity Payments, announced several months ago that over the next three years he’ll gradually raise the minimum salary there to $70,000.

How did his counterparts at other businesses react? Let’s get a prediction from Adam Smith, who wrote this 239 years ago in the most famous book about economics ever published, The Wealth of Nations:

“Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.”

Was Adam Smith right? As a recent New York Times story demonstrates, he called it precisely.

One of the most peculiar aspects of U.S. politics is that Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations are vociferously celebrated by conservatives. Here’s what one loyal Reaganite said at a memorial after Reagan’s death in 2004:

Ever since Ronald Reagan studied classical economics at Eureka College, Adam Smith was his hero.

But if Smith were alive today he’d be considered a crazy radical. In addition to his claim about employers, here are some other things he wrote in The Wealth of Nations:

• “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Book III, Chapter III

• “Men of inferior wealth combine to defend those of superior wealth in the possession of their property, in order that men of superior wealth may combine to defend them in the possession of theirs. … Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” Book V, Chapter I

• “High profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages. … Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.” Book I, Chapter IX

• “The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [business], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public …” Book I, Chapter XI

• “The rate of profit … is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.” Book I, Chapter XI

• “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Book I, Chapter X

I’m not sure how exactly the U.S. Right came to love Adam Smith so much. I guess they just neve

1KIKI

Thursday, August 6, 2015 1:12 PM

"I’m not sure how exactly the U.S. Right came to love Adam Smith so much. I guess they just never read him."

The same way they came to love social Darwinism without ever having read Darwin's proposals about evolution?

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

SECOND

Monday, October 26, 2015 6:31 AM

The $70,000 minimum wage is paying off for that Seattle company
Revenue is rising at twice the rate it was before CEO Dan Price decided to raise pay

Oct 25, 2015 5:38 p.m. ET By Silvia Ascarelli
www.marketwatch.com/story/the-70000-minimum-wage-is-paying-off-for-tha
t-seattle-company-2015-10-25

Gravity Payments, that Seattle credit-card-payments processing company that said all its employees would earn at least $70,000 in three years, is defying the doomsayers.

Revenue is growing at twice the rate it was before Chief Executive Dan Price made his announcement this spring, according to a report on Inc.com. Profits have doubled. Customer retention is up, despite some who left because they disagreed with the decision or feared service would suffer. (Price said he’d make up the extra cost by cutting his own $1.1 million pay.)

Barely any employees have left — although some outsiders, including some commenting on a MarketWatch article about the decision earlier this year, warned that employees could start putting in less effort because everyone is being paid the same regardless.

Perhaps not surprisingly, plenty of people want to work for Gravity. One who now works there is a former Yahoo executive who says she took an 80%-to-85% pay cut to take the job, according to Inc.

The company has hired an extra 10 people to handle the anticipated new business, Gravity’s vice president of operations, Maria Haley, told Inc.

Price, meanwhile, has invested another $3 million in the company after selling all his stocks, emptying his retirement accounts and taking out mortgages on two homes, according to Inc. (He told the New York Times three months ago that he was “renting out my house right now to try to make ends meet.)

“Having to depend on modest pay is not a bad thing,” he told the magazine, speaking about himself. “It will help me stay focused.”

Still hanging over him is a lawsuit filed by his brother, a Gravity co-founder and minority shareholder, that alleges Dan Price had previously paid himself “excessive compensation.” Lucas Price’s lawsuit isn’t related to the pay increases, Inc. said, citing Lucas Price’s lawyer.

SHINYGOODGUY

Monday, October 26, 2015 2:07 PM

I just thought this may be useful info:

https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-there-any-homeless-people-in-Switzerla
nd-Or-no-one-is-begging-on-streets

See, even Switzerland has homeless........?

SGG

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