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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  1660 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: $70,000 minimum wage update

Can you point me to a sentence in the NYT piece that indicates that the $70K minimum is in effect? It talks about the announcement and drama that followed, and then the current state of the company.

    Staff members gasped four years ago when Dan Price gathered the 120 employees at Gravity Payments, the company he had founded with his brother, and told them he was raising everyone’s salary to a minimum of $70,000, partly by slashing his own $1.1 million pay to the same level.

    So I came to Seattle to see what had unfolded: Did Gravity succeed or crash?

    Business has surged, and profits are higher than ever. Gravity last year processed $10.2 billion in payments, more than double the $3.8 billion in 2014, before the announcement. It has grown to 200 employees, all nonunion.

    The pay raise also helped attract new employees — including some who yearned to join a company with values. Tammi Kroll, a Yahoo executive, took an 80 percent pay cut to move to Gravity, where she is now chief operating officer.

Kroll joined by 2015 before the minimum wage policy was in effect.

Maggie Goodall joined recently and received $70K, but as you point out that’s not exceptional salary in Seattle.

Why would they remove the minimum salary from the list of employee benefits, after it brought them so much positive publicity? If they had raised the minimum to keep up with inflation, why not promote the higher number? Anyway, they still advertise some positions paying $70K. And there’s no mention of the minimum wage for a Technical Support Representative position in Boise, where $70K would go a long way.

Company reviews have little information; only one mentions compensation, as a “Con.”

I share your enthusiasm for a company that experiments with innovative compensation packages. If it works and the business is successful, it’s an idea that other companies can copy. But it has to work! Their own web site has a dated “Gravity of $70K” page which still says “the current minimum salary is $50K at Gravity” in an infographic.

    It worked. Still works. And the company is booming.

I agree, the announcement went viral, the company enjoyed great publicity, and they seem to be doing well now. It’s a private company and they don’t have to reveal their internal policies. It just seems fishy that they would ride the $70K publicity train while the policy was a popular proposal, and then remove mentions of $70K after it was supposed to go into effect. Would you assume Amazon is keeping it’s $15/hour pledge if Bezos were not still talking about it?