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Gravity Payments in Seattle Is Raising Minimum Salaries to $70K
- Namrog84 12y agoAs someone who has been above and below this mark. I truly hope that more companies and influential individuals follow this and start taking action. Freeing those of stress of things that shouldn't be stressing people in this era.
- chrisBob 12y agoI understand that the study was actually about household income. If my wife already has a good job does it follow that I shouldn't get paid?
- colinbartlett 12y agoAs a thought experiment: What would happen if all companies did this? If this was the actual minimum wage? Is there enough economic activity to support it nationwide? I would have to guess so, considering the volume of people who make drastically more than this. What kind of impact would such a massive redistribution of income have?
- martinflack 12y agoIt's interesting to ask this company, which I didn't get in the article - was this intended to be a minimum wage or common wage? The CEO was getting it too. The ramifications of each are quite different.
- endtime 12y agoPlenty of folks would be perfectly happy flipping burgers instead of going to college, so there would be fewer qualified folks for the positions which currently pay 70k, so those salaries would go up (since supply would be going down), so some of those businesses would go bankrupt, etc.
- onion2k 12y agoA burger flipping job isn't a bad job simply because it's paid badly. It's boring, unfulfilling, tedious and people don't respect you for doing it. People would still go to college to get jobs that have those things. Arguably a high minimum wage would mean no one would want rubbish burgers any more, so perhaps burger flippers would have to retrain as chefs. That wouldn't be such a bad thing.
- duaneb 12y ago> It's boring, unfulfilling, tedious and people don't respect you for doing it. You can say the same thing about any job. I program. It's a terrible, worthless, respectless job. And yet, they're paid more.
- loco5niner 12y agobut instead of rubbish burgers costing $1.50, they will now cost $3.00
- endtime 12y ago> It's boring, unfulfilling, tedious and people don't respect you for doing it. People would still go to college to get jobs that have those things. Ha, they'd give up on years of income and pay tuition for that? Nope, I think a lot of people either wouldn't care enough, or just wouldn't be able to afford the opportunity cost. For many of the people whom a 70k minimum wage would affect, college is a financial investment, not a route to lack of tedium as an accountant or whatever.
- newobj 12y ago"QED"
- littleweep 12y agoIf everyone made $70k though, wouldn't the amount of "buying power" that $70k commands now go down/prices of things would go up?
- 12y ago
- mycroft-holmes 12y agoPrices would adjust and everyone's purchasing power would revert back to what it was before the increase. Your standard of living would be the same while your paycheck has more digits.
- srtjstjsj 12y agoThis is false, because you are ignoring the fact that raising the minimum wage flattens the distribution of wages. Purchasing power decreases, but only low-wage-earners income increases. higher-spending people feel more of a crunch, and lower-income people get more of the benefit price increases impact higher-spenders more than lower-spenders
- duaneb 12y ago> What kind of impact would such a massive redistribution of income have? Surely this would have terrible inflationary effects. Not that I'm against it.
- dk421 12y agoI'd be concerned about what will happen if someone currently making $35k either loses their job or has to change jobs. Their lifestyle will (theoretically) be adjusted to an artificially inflated income which they will more than likely have trouble finding somewhere else for the same work.
- JonFish85 12y agoSo to the person who is currently making $75k and watching their coworker getting a $30k raise does what, exactly? Suddenly that person is worth 66% more, so what about everyone else? Come salary review time, I'd be asking for a huge raise, because clearly the company has the cash to throw around, and if they're handing out 50+% raises, my value must have also increased.
- dsg42 12y agoIf you read the article, you'll note that they don't actually have the cash for this. The CEO is taking a massive paycut to make it happen. That being said, that kind of logic demonstrates an incredible lack of caring for the people who are benefiting from this. I presume you make more than $70k a year, and you fail to understand what it's like to live on less than $48k, as half of his employees do, in a city like Seattle. Making sure his employees are well paid makes a huge difference in their lives in a way increasing someone's salary from 75k to 95k just doesn't.
- cheald 12y agoThe two aren't mutually exclusive. A skilled employee can both be happy for their coworker who is now living comfortably, and upset that they draw the same wage with twice the experience and domain-specific skills that their colleague doesn't possess. To put it another way, why invest time and money into education and specialized skills development if you can draw the same wage for an entry-level job with fewer responsibilities?
- jasonlotito 12y agoYou might have twice the experience, but if the value of your output and your coworkers output is the same, why should you get paid more?
- cheald 12y agoYou shouldn't, and that isn't my argument. If Gravity was paying some people $40k and some people $75k for the same work and result, they were being economically irrational. I'm saying that the $75k worker, up until today, was someone who likely commanded $75k because a) their training and experience allowed them to do productive work that exceeds that of entry-level workers, and b) they are harder to replace than entry-level workers. If your employer says "your value to this company is equivalent to the value of unskilled entry-level workers", when you are in fact a highly trained and experienced worker, that may well be difficult to swallow.
- sickpig 12y agoAlready posted and discussed here a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854
- shusain 12y agoIt seems like a flaw with Capitalism. In it's pure form, it leads to extremely wide wealth gaps. If history repeats itself, and conditions worsen, perhaps we'll see a repeat of the robber baron era which would then, as it did in the past, lead into an strong socialist reaction (unions and social welfare programs). Feels like a cycle.