Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
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Gravity Payments' $70K minimum salary: CEO Dan Price shares result. Aug. 11, 2016
www.today.com/money/gravity-payments-70k-minimum-salary-ceo-dan-price-
shares-results-t101678
It's been nearly a year and a half since CEO Dan Price announced plans to slash his roughly $1 million salary to $70,000, also making that the minimum salary for all the employees at his credit card processing company, Gravity Payments. The move shocked the business world and thrust the 32-year-old into the spotlight.
Since then, a lot has changed. After the initial flurry of praise — and then resumes, of course — there was the inevitable criticism: Was this all really a clever publicity stunt?
Looking back, Price insists it wasn't. But he also knows the experiment was, at least in part, a deliberate business move.
"It's not like I'm throwing money into a charity and having no hope of return," he told Today recently by phone. "I view this as a long-term investment."
A 'Happier' Workplace
Since the initial pay hike, there's been a baby boom at the office, and Gravity Payments, based in Seattle, has seen increased retention and happiness rates (the latter is measured by an online-survey service employees use) among workers. Their overall commute time is shorter, since some employees used the additional money to move closer to work.
Price himself made some cutbacks to adjust to the lower salary, although more out of sensibility than necessity. He now rents his house on Airbnb during the summer to make extra cash, and sleeps in the guest room at a friend's house.
"You might call it a sacrifice," he said, speaking from the borrowed room. "But to me, it's fun. It feels good."
A Temporary Pay Cut
Price is quick to state the obvious: that any life adjustments he's made as a result of earning less after earning so much more are hardly "putting me in some horrible, awful position."
Of course, even as he's emerged as a champion for income equality, he won't be making $70,000 forever, and that was never the plan.
"When I made the announcement, I said I would just put my salary back where it was once the company's profits had gone back to where they were," Price said. "I expected us to take a big step backwards."
But that's not what happened. Instead, sales skyrocketed after the announcement, and Gravity Payments continues to take on new clients at a rate it never had before. It reports nearly doubling profits in a year, from $3.5 million in 2014 to $6.5 million in 2015. So Price is re-evaluating the metrics, and still trying to decide what his income should look like.
Brotherly Divide: 'I love him and I believe he loves me'
The million-dollar-plus salary Price once earned, and presumably will again, has often been scrutinized, even amid praise for his wage hike, which he refers to as "the program." It was also at least partly to blame for his legal troubles with his brother, Lucas Price, with whom he co-founded Gravity Payments in 2004. Price recently won a court battle against Lucas, who'd claimed in a lawsuit that Price overpaid himself and abused a corporate spending account, according to reports.
Despite his victory, Price appears genuinely hurt by the rift with his brother.
"I feel bad that we have a hard time coexisting and maybe being good brothers to each other," he said. "It's something we need to improve on… but I love him and I believe he loves me."
In a Facebook post after the ruling, Price said that he's grateful to have the lawsuit behind him and "excited to once again get back to investing all of my time and energy into supporting our clients, communities and our team's mission to change the way we think about the purpose of business."
As for what impact his salary program, which is still being rolled out, has had on employees, Price repeatedly stresses that it's not only about the mone
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Quote:Five Years Later: The boss who put everyone on $70,000 minimum salary
Originally posted by second:
Gravity Payments' $70K minimum salary: CEO Dan Price shares result.
Aug. 11, 2016
28 February 2020
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 $1,000,000. 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.
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, Dan 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, 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."
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.
Since then, Gravity has transformed. The employee headcount has doubled and the value of payments that the company processes has gone from $3.8bn a year to $10.2bn.
Five years later, Price is still on Gravity's minimum salary. He says he's more fulfilled than he ever was when he was earning millions.
"There's tests every day," he says. "I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg and I have dark moments where I think, 'I want to be just as rich as Mark Zuckerberg and I want to compete with him to be on the Forbes list. And I want to be on the cover of Time magazine, making lots of money.' All these greedy things are tempting."
"It's not like it's easy to just turn down. But my life is so much better."
More at www.bbc.com/news/stories-51332811
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Good. So when are you hiring back all the people you fired for wrong think, upping all of your employees salaries at the cow-fart-bottling plant to $70k per year and cutting your own pay down to $70k per year?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, you are the guy who was opposed to raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour or $30,000 per year. You also misunderstood the very real point of the article which is that American business-owners keep wages low because they are greedy, then they deny it is greed and instead say that business would have to fire people if the minimum wage was raised.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Good. So when are you hiring back all the people you fired for wrong think, upping all of your employees salaries at the cow-fart-bottling plant to $70k per year and cutting your own pay down to $70k per year?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I will not be rehiring the Republican who stole diesel, or the Republican who embezzled, or the one who was selling my power tools. That is mostly because they now are convicted felons. My lawyers and private investigators made airtight cases because the Republican District Attorney did not care to spend his budget punishing Republicans. His advice had been to fire the thieves, give their future employers good references, and let them become somebody else's problem. He was advising reducing my expenses and also sabotaging my competitors with bad employees I fire. Pretty typical for a Republican. Being against raising wages is also pretty typical along with lying about the reason for not raising wages: pure greed.
My lowest paid? Per Year? $58,791. But Texas isn't as expensive as Seattle. And that employee is buying a new house. I promised her in December $50,000 for the down payment, but she doesn't get the money until she closes on a deal. She is still looking at houses. That $50K is above and beyond salary.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are the guy who was opposed to raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour or $30,000 per year. You also misunderstood the very real point of the article which is that American business-owners keep wages low because they are greedy, then they deny it is greed and instead say that business would have to fire people if the minimum wage was raised.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Good. So when are you hiring back all the people you fired for wrong think, upping all of your employees salaries at the cow-fart-bottling plant to $70k per year and cutting your own pay down to $70k per year?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I will not be rehiring the Republican who stole diesel, or the Republican who embezzled, or the one who was selling my power tools. That is mostly because they now are convicted felons. My lawyers and private investigators made airtight cases because the Republican District Attorney did not care to spend his budget punishing Republicans. His advice had been to fire the thieves, give their future employers good references, and let them become somebody else's problem. He was advising reducing my expenses and also sabotaging my competitors with bad employees I fire. Pretty typical for a Republican. Being against raising wages is also pretty typical along with lying about the reason for not raising wages: pure greed.
My lowest paid? Per Year? $58,791. But Texas isn't as expensive as Seattle. And that employee is buying a new house. I promised her in December $50,000 for the down payment, but she doesn't get the money until she closes on a deal. She is still looking at houses. That $50K is above and beyond salary.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
This isn't about me. This is about you.
Don't go parading articles around about other people and how great they are and then not doing the same thing yourself.
I don't give a shit what your lowest employee makes. You've made millions of dollars in the last three years in tax breaks alone, let alone your income.
Put your money where your mouth is and live like the rest of us like this dude you look up to so much.
Either that, or go fuck right off about it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:This thread started with a comparison between Switzerland and America's work culture. The biggest difference is that in America your average Republican businessman refuses to pay a $15 per hour minimum wage. $15 enrages a Republican. All the Republicans I know are stingy to their employees, if the employee has to take the job.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
This isn't about me. This is about you.
Keeping wages low is how Republican employers gets richer faster and faster. That is why slavery was very popular at one time in Texas. It was a perfectly legal way to set wages at zero to maximize the businessman's wealth growth. Paying a slave to pick cotton was as ridiculous as paying a horse to plow.
With Support of Just 3 Republicans, House Democrats Pass 'Historic' Raise the Wage Act to Guarantee Workers $15 Minimum Wage
www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/18/support-just-3-republicans-house-
democrats-pass-historic-raise-wage-act-guarantee
"We just voted to raise the federal minimum wage for the first time in a decade and Republicans are on the floor wailing, 'socialism.' How pathetic." Republicans claimed the passage of the bill was akin to sacrificing "the wages, families, and livelihoods of American workers...upon the altar of socialist ideology."
That bill died in the GOP controlled Senate.
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/582/text
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Cut your pay. That's what the article you've been tracking for five years was all about.
It's got a happy ending. Time to give up those millions.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The article was about raising pay to $70,000 per year. All Republicans were enraged at the idea of $40 per hour minimum wage for 1,750 hours of work per year. In the original article the Republicans called it Communism. All the Republicans said the business would fail. It did not fail. A Republican owned business could raise its minimum to $40/hour, but it won't because that cuts into the wealth of the business owner.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Cut your pay. That's what the article you've been tracking for five years was all about.
It's got a happy ending. Time to give up those millions.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Republicans claimed the passage of a minimum wage bill was akin to sacrificing "the wages, families, and livelihoods of American workers...upon the altar of socialist ideology." That bill died in the GOP controlled Senate.
www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/18/support-just-3-republicans-house-
democrats-pass-historic-raise-wage-act-guarantee
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The article was about raising pay to $70,000 per year.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Cut your pay. That's what the article you've been tracking for five years was all about.
It's got a happy ending. Time to give up those millions.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
No. It wasn't.
It was about raising pay to $70,000 per year AND cutting his own pay to only $70,000 per year.
Time to give up those Millions, Brewster.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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6ix, working in America is lousy compared to Switzerland since Republican Congressmen don't want to raise the minimum wage to $15 because that would be socialism. Raising the minimum to $40/hr ( or $70,000/year of 1,750 hours work ) is worse than socialism. Republicans call it Communism.
Healthcare like Switzerland has is called Communism by Republicans.
Four to five weeks paid vacation in Switzerland? Communism per the GOP.
www.swissinfo.ch/eng/jetting-off_swiss-enjoy-more-and-more-paid-annual
-leave/44221002
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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