
Gravity Payments in Seattle Is Raising Minimum Salaries to $70K - matt_morgan
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity-payments-a-credit-card-processor-is-setting-a-new-minimum-wage-70000-a-year.html
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sickpig
Already posted and discussed here a few hours ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371854)

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JonFish85
So 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.

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dsg42
If 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.

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cheald
The 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?

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jasonlotito
You 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?

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cheald
You 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.

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jasonlotito
> You shouldn't, and that isn't my argument.

That is your argument. The company decides what it values, not you.

> 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.

Your value doesn't necessary map to your training and experience.

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dk421
I'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.

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Namrog84
As 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.

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chrisBob
I 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?

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colinbartlett
As 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?

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endtime
Plenty 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.

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onion2k
A 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.

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endtime
> 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.

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shusain
It 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.

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LLWM
What part is the flaw?

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shusain
The flaw is that it always leads to extreme income inequality. There's no
inherent mechanism to prevent it.

