Employees at an Idaho business got good news this week when they got to know that workers making $40,00, the company’s current minimum salary would get an immediate $10,000 raise and that within five years, the minimum salary would increase to $70,000.
Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit card processing company, recently acquired ChargeItPro in Eagle, Idaho, and the group moved into a new office space. Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price arrived to welcome employees to the new office and then surprised them with the news that many of the employees would get a $10,000 pay bump effective immediately and the minimum salary for employees would rise to $70,000 by 2024.
Price announced the news on Twitter: ”This morning we cut the ribbon on the new @GravityPymts Boise office AND announced that all of our employees here will start earning our $70k min salary,” “I’m so grateful to work with this amazing team and to be able to compensate them for the value they bring to our community.”
According to Price, a majority of the employees were making under $30,000 prior to the acquisition.
“I’m kind of heartbroken right now by the vast consolidation of wealth and power that’s happening, and in addition how that’s affecting our decisions around climate,” Price, 35, told ABC News.
“I’m sick of being part of the problem, I want to be part of the solution,”
“Previously, I was making a million dollars a year and people working for me were making $30,000 a year and that’s wrong, I was feeding into the problem.”
“I heard from somebody who was a single parent, that they were not necessarily going to need to work two jobs anymore … and they were going to be a better parent,”
“I took between an 80 and 90 percent pay cut, and our chief operating officer took about an 80 percent pay cut, and our executive team absolutely makes less than what other companies would pay,” he said. “It absolutely is coming out of executive pay, it’s an investment, I think we’ve proven that it can work.”
“We are a real business and not a charity organization. We’re growing and thriving as a business, we’re not taking outside money, we’re not taking donations,” he added. “We’re succeeding as a business doing this.”
“We went from having zero to two babies born per year to having over 30 babies born.”
He added that it is “surprising and a bit disturbing” that more companies haven’t followed suit in redistributing profits.
“I’m just shocked at the lack of willingness to do this, especially in big companies in corporate America,” he added. “We’ve proven that this can work.”
“We need to be really nice to our small business owners,”
“Any company that is making over a million dollars a year in profit absolutely should be doing this,”
“The inequality needs to stop.”
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