The “Fight for 15” movement, led by fast food workers to raise our country’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, may seem ambitious to some, since it seeks to more than double the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. But it’s catching on across the country. And if you look at the issue from the perspective of Dan Price, $15 an hour is way too little.
The founder and CEO of a credit-card payment processing company based in Seattle, Price announced this week that the new minimum wage at his company is to be $70,000 a year. If you do the math, that’s nearly five times the current minimum wage and more than double the goal of the Fight for 15 campaign. AFSCME is a strong proponent of raising the federal minimum wage. To us, it’s a civil rights issue.
Price said his inspiration came partly from a study on happiness by two prominent social scientists. The study found that an individual’s emotional well-being increases with income up to approximately $75,000/year. After that, money doesn’t buy you happiness, but if you make significantly less you’ll tend to have low emotional well-being.
The current average salary of the 120-person staff at Gravity Payments is $48,000. To be able to raise his company’s minimum wage to $70,000 during the next three years, Price is lowering his own salary of nearly $1 million to the new minimum and using much of the company’s anticipated profits this year.
It’s unrealistic to hope that other CEOs will drastically raise their employee’s wages out of concern for their emotional well-being. But at least the Price is right in Seattle.