"We saw, every day, the effects of giving somebody freedom"

February 28, 2020 9:42 PM

Remember a few years ago when the owner of a credit card payment processing company based in Seattle raised the minimum wage of his employees to $70,000/yr while taking a huge pay-cut himself and capitalists the world over, afraid of their beloved & apparently suuuuper delicate system collapsing from such madness, flipped out? The BBC recently checked in with Gravity Payments and its owner Dan Price to see how things were going. Pretty damn well, as it turns out. (via, h/t Chrysostom)
posted by Johnny Wallflower (36 comments total)

I love this. No, not the part where the big hearted millionaire gave his employees a living wage out of the kindness of his heart because he's as rare as hens teeth. I mean the part where the people getting a living wage had dramatic improvements not only in their productivity but in their lives.

We don't have to just hope the parasites will give us our freedom. We can make that world for ourselves. But the parasites stealing all of the surplus to service their egos (and the boot lickers and social climbers who worship them) have to go.
posted by Reyturner at 10:42 PM on February 28, 2020 [63 favorites]

Great story. Here in Denmark, the labor agreement negotiations are just about finished and everyone has gotten a raise + more but I'm not paying too much attention. We don't actually have a state mandated minimum wage, we have agreements between unions and business associations, which lead to a de facto minimum wage, which I think is about 50.000 dollars. But then we all have healthcare and public education and a small state pension.
posted by mumimor at 12:14 AM on February 29, 2020 [15 favorites]

Yes, this was an interesting story, and it's striking how radical it seems. It's so clear to see that an increase in wages does buy happiness. When you are not worried about becoming homeless over a burst tyre, surely your quality of life is better.

But I didn't get the bit at the end where the employees felt bad for him and bought him a car?! Like it's so awful to use an old car? BIt weird that - but I'm coming at it from a British perspective...
posted by sedimentary_deer at 12:22 AM on February 29, 2020 [20 favorites]

I guess they wanted to do something nice for him, and the Tesla was probably more pleasant to drive and cheaper to run. I think the symbolism is really important, though, in this era of "undercover" "bosses" and "millionaires": no-one is indulging in largesse, here, it's just people who, because they are being treated fairly and sensibly in their legal and contractual relationships with their employer, are able to treat their employer as a human being they would like to help, rather than a monster, deity or both. It feel like it'ss not really an inversion of the appalling "and you get a Tesla, and you get a Tesla and you get training" shit, so much as an example of how most people will tend to behave if you let them stop scrambling to survive for a minute. I expect at least some of the people buying the car havs their own thoughts about it as a symbolic act, although I'm not saying they necessarily align with mine.

The enormous lie of capitalism, that it's "human nature" to treat the people around us as badly as we possibly can, is rather embarrassingly shown up here.
posted by howfar at 1:20 AM on February 29, 2020 [61 favorites]

I am all for companies paying their workers much better, and owners paying themselves much less. It’s something I try to practice myself, and it’s an admirable thing.

However, according to a couple of reports, Dan Price’s story is not so straightforward in terms of what he previously earned, why he made the change, numerous lawsuits, and the fact he has been accused of assaulting his ex-wife.

The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide (Bloomberg)

New Evidence Supports Allegations That Famed $70K CEO Dan Price Beat Ex-Wife (Hundred Eighty Degrees)
posted by adrianhon at 1:20 AM on February 29, 2020 [16 favorites]

Also, not that the OP was to know, but the BBC sadly has form these days in printing reheated puff pieces about businesses. I wish it weren’t the case as there are many good journalists there, but the website seems to be particularly vulnerable to PRs pitching feel-good stories. Reader beware.
posted by adrianhon at 1:23 AM on February 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

New Evidence Supports Allegations That Famed $70K CEO Dan Price Beat Ex-Wife (Hundred Eighty Degrees

My goodness, that was a slog. It's like the author deliberately goes out of their way to bury entirely credible allegations in lurid and confusing prose. They do reference the article I've linked, and I'm really not sure what they useful add to what is already known. There's no reason to doubt Kristie Cólon, and I feel a bit weird that the Hundred Eighty Degrees piece seems like a trawl through publicly available documents to expose the experiences of a victim of domestic abuse, without her apparent cooperation or consent. They don't even say they tried to contact her for comment.

It feels like one important advantage of believing victims of violence is that it should help protect us all from being subjected to public scrutiny of this kind, whether that is done with the intention of undermining or confirming our experiences.

That this particular article makes me uncomfortable does not make me doubt Cólon's accounts of the violence she experienced.
posted by howfar at 2:00 AM on February 29, 2020 [21 favorites]

But I didn't get the bit at the end where the employees felt bad for him and bought him a car?! Like it's so awful to use an old car? BIt weird that - but I'm coming at it from a British perspective...

It seems staged in light of the damning articles about him, because he has image handlers who also count as employees. According to this video from 180degrees, he is listing restaurants as bars to pay lower fees, pocketing the rest. According to 180degrees in their print story linked above, they were initially going to track the social benefits angle of the salary raise and did their homework on Price, which started to unravel on him, so they ended up with a different story to tell. Unfortunately in America, and probably most places, people don't care what good something is unless it comes from a saint they can worship, because they don't trust themselves to know what good is.
posted by Brian B. at 5:57 AM on February 29, 2020 [15 favorites]

It would be nice if the financial press always did such thorough digging into the murky parts of the pasts of all CEOs, not just CEOs who raise the wages of their employees.
posted by clawsoon at 7:10 AM on February 29, 2020 [38 favorites]

Although... now that I've read the extra links... maybe I shouldn't offer such whataboutisms.
posted by clawsoon at 7:23 AM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

Or maybe: Look, psychopath CEOs! You can pay your employees well, and still get to be the manipulative, abusive asshole you always wanted to be! It's a win-win!
posted by clawsoon at 7:26 AM on February 29, 2020 [31 favorites]

This is why we can't have nice things.
posted by bleep at 7:51 AM on February 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

Well this took a dark turn.
posted by Young Kullervo at 8:00 AM on February 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

I guess altruistic, big hearted millionaires are even rarer than hen's teeth.
posted by Reyturner at 8:46 AM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

even rarer than hen's teeth

Aren't there some scientists trying to breed a chickenosaurus with teeth? Maybe that's what we need to do to get altruistic millionaires...
posted by clawsoon at 9:39 AM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

On the topic of the altruism of the economic elite: The Charade of Elite Philanthropy
posted by eviemath at 9:51 AM on February 29, 2020 [9 favorites]

Maybe that's what we need to do to get altruistic millionaires...

That or we do the other thing that happened to dinosaurs...
posted by Reyturner at 9:56 AM on February 29, 2020

A pity though his private scandals are overshadowing the fact that wellpaid employees are more productive and happy
posted by Mrs Potato at 10:03 AM on February 29, 2020 [17 favorites]

private scandals

To call violently beating his wife, on many occasions, and then hushing it up, a "private scandal" is... Really... Well, shameful. This is not the shame you're talking about, though.

I agree that paying his employees a living wage is a cover for his nefarious behavior.
Why is it so hard for our political system to enforce a proper living wage? This dude is not a Millennial hero, or at least, not my Millennial hero.
posted by erattacorrige at 11:02 AM on February 29, 2020 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I don't need this guy to be a nice person to applaud the fact that he's doing the right thing in one aspect of his life. Scumbag who pays a living wage > scumbag who doesn't.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:15 AM on February 29, 2020 [17 favorites]

I agree that paying his employees a living wage is a cover for his nefarious behavior.

In case anyone missed it, the Bloomberg article claims the money for raises came out of his brother's distribution as the other shareholder and was only offered to employees after his brother's lawsuit was filed against him for paying himself too much. He also owns a yacht he paid 250k for cash, to illustrate his habits.
posted by Brian B. at 11:17 AM on February 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

These problems (at least the money problems) are solved by 90% of the worlds wealth not being controlled by a bunch of sociopath nepotism cases.
posted by Reyturner at 11:33 AM on February 29, 2020 [6 favorites]

Turn all businesses into employee owned businesses (aka ESOP's) and we could avoid this whole clusterf#(&.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 4:20 PM on February 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

Ah, this is that "capitalism with a human face" I've heard so much about
posted by eustatic at 5:43 PM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

Who then should be our next mega-philanthropist? Are there billionaires who contribute to charity or employee's lives that aren't evil in any way?

I love what Mackenzie Bezos has done. I love that the Zucks funded a multi-million-dollar public hospital in San Francisco. Warren Buffett seems like a righteous dude. Bill and Melinda are doing good things for the world.

Sure, I don't love the people with the money, I don't know if there's a good soul among them. But the truth is that it's hard to accomplish anything here let alone solve big problems without money. A move away from that will be hard-fought but ultimately must happen.
posted by bendy at 9:02 PM on February 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

Also, once things like wages based on cost-of-living expenses and reasonable costs for healthcare, childcare, and education become more and more real, because of these efforts by the wealthy, more lives will become incrementally better. Even giving homeless people in San Francisco better resources for care (now the Zucker SF hospital) can reduce the amount of homelessness there.

10% of your employees owning homes may not be a lot, but it's still ten times more than it was.

America's bar for what's acceptable keeps getting lower and lower. This guy may have done awful things but he also did good things. Relatively speaking, I can't hate him.
posted by bendy at 9:22 PM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

Also the efforts of the people like Price's employees who are less stressed financially and can give money and volunteer time to any cause they want.
posted by bendy at 9:30 PM on February 29, 2020

I can't think of a single good thing Donald Trump has done, but these are the arguments that his supporters make. Yeah, he said he can grab women by the pussy anytime he wants, and yeah, his ex wife initially wrote that Trump raped her while they were married, and yeah, another famous columnist was actually raped by Donald Trump, but THE ECONOMY!! JOB CREATION!!
posted by erattacorrige at 3:07 AM on March 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

For me, it's not a question of whether an individual multimillionaire or billionaire is doing a good act here or there. That they possess such wealth is inherently immoral, and if they choose to bestow it on whatever they deem to be good causes, I treat that more as the caprices of the gods on Mount Olympus than anything else. One day they'll do something good and then next day they'll do something awful. They are both human in their errors and inhuman in their capabilities.

Take Bill Gates as an example. No doubt his foundation has done many many good things. It has also, in his own admission, completely fucked up a whole bunch of schools based on his belief that they should be run in a certain way. And where did the money come from? A corporation that abused its market position, engaged in an illegal monopoly, and arguably set back the flourishing of the entire digital ecosystem by years.
posted by adrianhon at 3:34 AM on March 1, 2020 [22 favorites]

Sure, I don't love the people with the money, I don't know if there's a good soul among them. But the truth is that it's hard to accomplish anything here let alone solve big problems without money.

If they paid taxes, the money would still be there. It would be distributed into a system where we as a whole can decide what problems it should solve. It would probably get used making things foundationally better, like improving our overall health care. Then there wouldn't be as much of a need for interventionist philanthropy.

That's what this article is trying to demonstrate. When money was given directly to the people, they could spend it where it was actually needed, like healthcare, transportation, and homes. In the billionaire model, he would have kept all the money and unilaterally made decisions about where to gift it, if at all. Everyone is stuck being beholden to an abuser and dependent upon his largesse.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:54 AM on March 1, 2020 [16 favorites]

bendy: Warren Buffett seems like a righteous dude.

Warren Buffett disowned his granddaughter for appearing in The One Percent, if you're looking for something to take the shine off him.
posted by clawsoon at 5:16 AM on March 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

erratacorrige, wherever you are going wit the line of thought based on a hastily written sentence still attempting to point out that people must be paid more and its a good thing (labour vs mgt etc) is very much barking up the wrong tree. Distractions from the essence of pay people well and raise minimum wage are an art the americans are particularly good at. Have at it.
posted by Mrs Potato at 7:15 AM on March 1, 2020

Sure, I don't love the people with the money, I don't know if there's a good soul among them. But the truth is that it's hard to accomplish anything here let alone solve big problems without money.

Implying money comes from, rather than goes to, rich people.
posted by Reyturner at 10:08 AM on March 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

Distractions from the essence of pay people well and raise minimum wage are an art the americans are particularly good at. Have at it.

Implying I'm not in support of this because I refuse to laud an abusive, wealthy white guy is also wrong. His employees earn the money they make. They earn it. They deserve it. Some Jesus haired man descending from on high to sprinkle a bit of fairy dust on deserving workers doesn't address the underlying issue. Structural change needs to happen so that shit like this doesn't- men using their financial leverage to obscure their otherwise shitty behavior.
posted by erattacorrige at 11:44 AM on March 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

If y'all are interested in exactly what kind of structural change can accomplish this, you might enjoy reading about Scandinavian wage compression (PDF). It didn't prevent the rise of super-wealthy families, and it didn't prevent a successful political and propaganda backlash by those families when workers went further and tried to socialize a bit of ownership, but it was at least an example of what workers can do with and for each other by organizing. Top wages go down; bottom wages go up; a lot more people end up at the "enough money to not be stressed about it all the time" level.
posted by clawsoon at 12:30 PM on March 1, 2020 [7 favorites]

Yes, this should absolutely be a structural thing. But at this point in time I think there is some value in at least having a clear example here in the U.S. that we can point to and say that yes, this is not only feasible but has desirable outcomes. There are so many loud voices out there saying that it could obviously never work.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:25 AM on March 2, 2020 [3 favorites]