Gravity Payments: Seattle company with a minimum salary of $70K
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Was your friend a contractor? Did he require a work visa? Was he based in the US and working at their office? Was he actually being directly employed by them or through an intermediary?
Just a random thought. I don’t know the company or the parent in anyway so I am neither supporting nor dismissing anything.
In certain businesses, there’s actually a lot to be said for only being willing to hire a person who can provide at least $70k of value.
It’s also a bit of a misnomer to laud the owner of a company and 100% of its equity for taking a salary cut.
All that said I think that greed and what I’ll call “celebrity” drives the income disparity between the median and the 90th percentile workers’ salaries at a given company far too high.
As an aside, this sentence was so tongue-in-cheek it was jarring;
> Jody Hall, a good liberal who worries about income inequality, owns a nearby cafe, Cupcake Royale. She chooses Gravity to process her payments, admires what Price has done and offers her own employees health care.
Obviously there is a cost past salary but it’s not over 100%
in the US, there will be an extra ~10% above that for FICA/unemployment. The company will probably shell out another ~$12k for health insurance (I'm speaking averages here - I know some companies are very generous, and others aren't). Factor in some x% salary matching in to a 401k - say another 5%, and perhaps some other perks. Let's say there's another ~$20k on top of the $70k - that $70k employee may cost the company $95k.
If you then want to apportion office/equipment costs, you can do that too, but that $70k employee is not costing $140k (unless, perhaps, they're being very generous with some shares and there's a cost associated with that, and perhaps tuition reimbursement, company car and some other perks on top of what was mentioned above... maybe). Those sorts of things aren't generally given to someone in the US making $70k.
Typical burdened labor rate is 1.3x to 1.5x of annual salary. Exceptions exist, but usually it’s clear why that’s the exception (e.g., exceptionally generous benefits for a competitve labor category, local laws, etc.).
In high school friends who worked there loved it because it meant they knew they could go out on Saturday nights without worry about having a Sunday morning shift. Want to buy tickets for a concert six months away? If it was on Sunday you knew 100% for sure that you could go. Meanwhile I worked at a grocery store and my schedule was different pretty much every week. For people who work M-F jobs, it's easy to forget the difficulty in making weekend plans when you don't know very far in advance what days or hours you'll being required to be at work.
sane scheduling would have been the no. 1 thing to improve that job.
Even in the areas where fast food workers get $15 an hour because it’s hard to find workers, they don’t give you any better service.
Does that amount of money let them live without constant financial stress? Because that's where you really see the benefits of paying a bit more.
It’s only good business sense if it increases profits. Otherwise it’s moral.
For one, people's expectations change. I couldn't count the number of times I've seen a Bay Area software engineer 4 years out of college genuinely believe they're justified in complaining about their lot in life because they can't afford a 5 bedroom house in Palo Alto, all the while being driven around and being fed for free by workers making $20 an hour who have to try and live in the same area.
Look at the obvious internal strife at places like Google over efforts like Maven and Dragonfly. If it was just money motivating them, would you see that? Would you see people who leave over it?
E.g. this guy has pictures from yachts, but he's not enjoying it, he's working: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-lonely-life-of-a-yac...
I don't believe you.
I believe that there are people like this saying they could probably demand more money, and also that they may be commenting on how ludicrously high housing costs are in the bay area, and how that makes it hard to afford to buy a house even on a very high nominal salary.
But I find that comments like this are usually exaggerating others' sense of entitlement. Certainly it's very common in the CS career subreddit that I moderate. And having grown up in the bay area and worked at Google in the bay area...I just haven't seen many, if any, devs this entitled-sounding. So no, I don't believe you've hit this mega-entitled doucheperson "more times than you can count".
People are getting driven around because it’s the frugal thing to do. Have you seen what parking costs?
A few years ago my barber opened up his own shop and I asked him why he left his last position. He didn't say anything about pay but rather he didn't like the way the owner spoke with him.
Maybe at some minimum level salary is important. But whenever I hear complaints about employment, they often focus on respect and conditions. Even on the high end (mostly finance types), I hear dissatisfaction despite obscene inflated salaries. And it rarely has to do with salary, but more likely purpose, colleagues, etc. And turnover still remains high.
If higher salaries led to happiness, friendliness and helpfulness, I'd imagine the highest paid professions should have workers that exhibit all these qualities. But my general impression is that this is not true
Good managers == low churn
I've only ever worked with 1 good manager in my career. Not surprisingly the rest that I did work with who were terrible were the ones which frankly had no business being in IT at all.
They were all the types that because they had a friend or neighbour who advised them on tech matters, meant that they understood the issues and how to resolve them.
Always ended up not lasting more than 18 months at said company.
Although what I took from all those experiences, is how to apply them when talking to 3rd party consultants/teams and getting to the bottom of issues very quickly and finding solutions.
I think I've figured out a way to carve a path around bad managers. The reason I typically leave is due to poor upper management. Lack of vision, alignment, or growth opportunities for the company.
source: I worked at chik fil a
Aside from the technical aspects, I was struck by how much "Dan Price!" there was in everything I read. Here we have some more.
I think this whole 70k a year thing has been very clever. The guy is getting millions of dollars of publicity for giving about half the company a modest raise...
Not criticizing the guy - he seems kind. And whatever the personal gain he gets from this, he's acting as a "rising tide" here.
He being portrayed as Jesus on multiple magazines is nauseating, to say the least.
https://hips.hearstapps.com/esq.h-cdn.co/assets/16/31/147016...
But eventually it did: 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.”
Impossible to know whether this would work in different market conditions, but it’s a good sign. One rationalization could be workers being more productive because they are paid more. I know this clashes with some economic models, but there’s definitely a marginal argument for getting more for paying more.
Hard pass.
It's clearly something that comes up on Glassdoor a lot[0]
[0]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891_P2....
At first, I was extremely skeptical, but it actually works well when you work with people who act like reasonable, understanding adults. If you don't, then the vacation policy won't matter, because it's going to suck working for them no matter what.
Honestly, I don't think I would take a job offer that only included 2 weeks vacation, even if the pay was exceptional. Early on in my career I didn't mind not having much vacation, since I rarely, if at all, used it. Now that I'm older, the added flexibility is more important.
Tho at places with unlimited at least you can usually justify taking 3 weeks plus sick days even if 2 is the norm.
Maybe workaholism is just more common here than in other areas?
Just like the list of requirements are a guideline, so too are perks offered on job postings, and you don't actually have to settle for what they first offer you. So long as the labor market for programming is hot, you should take advantage of it.
As for me, most of the 10-day-PTO gigs were earlier in my career (startups seem to almost universally opt for “unlimited”). Going into the most recent one, I had other priorities to negotiate for.
But mostly, the way we think about time off and work/life balance in the US bites.
Though, I was also doing some real estate transactions (selling and buying a house) so some of the days were also for that.
In the end, it was a very nice bonus though.
I think this is only the case if vacation is accrued. If it's a single yearly lump, it doesn't appear they have that obligation (at least, not in NYC)
This year I’ve already arranged for 7 weeks vacation
I'd be surprised if I took 60 days of vacation in 30 years as an FTE.
Are you saying that you'd be surprised to have taken 60 days (12 weeks) in a single year, or that across 30 years you don't think you've taken 60 days in total?
The latter would be very surprising to me, but seems to be the most natural reading of your sentence.
Typically I'd work for somewhere for 5 years and then pocket the vacation when I left. There might be a single week (or two) off and a handful of Fridays off in that time.
I'll tell you when the non-vacation time comes up is when you become a FT contractor. If the money flows, you row.
> But Brantner said research indicates that employees with unlimited vacation tend to take less vacation each year than workers who have caps on their vacation days. This, she said, is partly because many companies have policies requiring those with limited vacation days to use those days or lose them at the end of a calendar year, which encourages those workers to take off all the time they're allowed.
> The 2017 HR Mythbusters report by Namely, which offers HR software and services to midsize companies, found that employees who were offered unlimited vacation took, on average, 13 days off a year, while workers with capped vacation days took, on average, 15 days off.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-re...
> A rundown of research compiled by Sage Business Researcher showed that companies offering unlimited vacation found that in many cases it actually encouraged employees to take less time off. Other research shows that it may even create competition to take fewer days off.
https://www.inc.com/john-boitnott/unlimited-vacation-sounds-...
"Unlimited vacation" is not actually unlimited. Hear it from Joshua Reeves, CEO of ZenPayroll, which offers this benefit to their employees:
> Even if your time off is technically “unlimited,” your manager obviously doesn’t expect you’ll take off 75% of the time. Actually, he or she probably has at least a general range of number of days or weeks in mind that is acceptable for an employee to take off—even if that range hasn't been openly communicated. Similarly, your company may expect you to take a minimum number of vacation days. At the company HubSpot, for example, employees are expected to take at least two weeks off each year under its “two weeks to infinity” policy.
> To get a sense of the norms, ask your boss (or other colleagues) how many days or weeks other employees typically take off. If the theme seems to be “2-3 weeks, plus a day here and there,” stick to that. If you have any doubt about whether you’re using the vacation policy appropriately, pay attention to how your manager and those around you use it. (Of course, be careful: Some workplaces do have different rules and expectations for managers and their reports.)
https://www.themuse.com/advice/unlimited-vacation-policy-wha...
So if the company has an idea how much vacation you should or should not take, why call it "unlimited"? Because it's great marketing (for those who don't think about the above factors anyway), and because vacation that is not accrued does not need to be paid out. Back to that SHRM article:
> Some organizations, Brantner said, began offering this benefit as a way to get around having to pay workers for unused vacation days when they left a company.
> "I'm absolutely sure that it originated in some camps as a way to get a vast amount of vacation time off the books. It was something preferred by accountants and others looking at the bottom line. At the same time, there are companies that adopted it with good intentions and that believe in the value of taking vacations."
> In November 2017, the Financial Times reported that "a big firm that ditches fixed paid leave for open vacations can wipe millions of dollars' worth of unused leave liabilities from its books that would otherwise be paid to departing employees. At the same time, it can safely offer bottomless holidays knowing most employees will never take them, especially in the U.S., the only major advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee workers paid vacation time."
It quickly becomes clear that for all the talk about it being "unlimited", most employers will be very uncomfortable when you start offering up numbers even slightly above the caps most other places.
Most of the time these "unlimited" policies seem to either be extremely cynical (with full knowledge of studies into the subject) or reflective of workaholics with extremely naive views of how much vacation time someone might like to take if it felt truly unlimited.
Frankly, it sounds to me like you don't know much about Netflix either.
A small sample of reviews:
"Work life balance is a joke at times but it depends on team and manager"
"High turnover rate, culture of fear"
"most managers are stressed out all the time and encouraged to weed out employees no longer useful or not performing to "high standards"
"Culture is a lie"
"Take the good salary with the risk it gives. You will be let go, it's just a matter of when."
Go on blind and talk directly to Netflix engineers. The ones that fit the culture are universally happy. The ones that are unhappy are the ones who likely aren’t good fits and will get let go soon. My friend said he saw 20 people let go in 2 years. But he’s genuinely happy being there and makes over $600,000/yr.
> The ones who work there love it.
Again, this clearly isn't true based on what's posted on Glassdoor. Many people have written about being blindsided and fired without any warning or indication. That kind of environment gets toxic, clearly not everyone who works there is happy. There's a reason the word "cult" gets dropped constantly. Are you saying those people who claimed to be fired despite good performance are just trolls who've never actually worked there?
If anything, Glassdoor review bias tends to skew towards companies because HR departments send out internal emails asking employees to fill out positive reviews to counter the negative reviews. I've been asked to fill out positive employment reviews by my employer on multiple occasions throughout my career, but perhaps my experience is unusual.
> My friend said he saw 20 people let go in 2 years. But he’s genuinely happy being there and makes over $600,000/yr.
How he doesn't wonder when they're going to axe him is beyond me, but I'm not privy to his situation. In most companies, turnover like that dramatically destabilizes the culture and retention of truly outstanding employees.
It's a pity, because it does sound like you know something about this topic.
Here is an experiment at it - Techloaf (The Register for newsletters) asks it's viewers to write Glassdoor reviews about Techloaf. https://us17.campaign-archive.com/?u=14538d8f8591165977d9a9d... (Search for Glassdoor) A CARL TO ACTION: REVIEW US ON GLASSDOOR
Here are the actual reviews. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/TechLoaf-Reviews-E2069280....
Who's word would you take for it?
Anonymous reviews on Glassdoor don't seem to agree with that.
I recently turned down a job offer at a company based upon friend's feedback and went to a lower paying job that had a lot of negative reviews on glass door. So far, at a month in, I havent seen anything backing the negative reviews. I'm happy at this point, and my commute is the best I've ever had. 15-20 minutes door to door.
The traditional workaround for startups had been to award equity instead, but for a variety of legitimate reasons, workers these days are cynical about the value of startup equity.
And again, it’s clearly not for everyone, but that’s ok, as long as it appeals to some people. Investment banking is also a terrible job for most sane people, but for a small percentage of the population it’s perfect.
It’s also expensive to hire people and pay them top dollar while waiting to see if they will fail or not. Again, this is what job interviews are for.
Regardless, employees should be comfortable about their jobs and not feel like they’re hanging under an axe that’s waiting to drop. If there’s a problem with performance, it’s on both the employee and the company to form a solution. Sometimes great employees, for example, can be hamstrung by situations outside of their control. Either within the company or outside it.
(Context: before they were making $2.34/day)
[0] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-min...
> Ford employees would be “demoralized by this sudden affluence,”
I am always amazed at the ability of people to rationalize fucking over others as somehow good for them.
It would certainly be nice if I was paid based on value generated (it would mean a big raise even in SV), but that's not normally how economies work.
The same apartment in Manhattan will cost more than in Houston. The same mixed drink costs more at a fancy restaurant as at a dive bar.
Demand is as relative to price as supply is. There is a lower demand for developers in Topeka, and so the cost of developers is lower as a result.
If you could materialize a drink from a distant bar in your kitchen, and the drink from the dive bar was identical to the one from the fancy restaurant, would you pay more for the one from the fancy restaurant?
Consider a real-world example. You go to the grocery store and buy some strawberries. Some of the boxes are from a place where they’re cheaper to grow, and some are from a place where they’re more expensive to grow. Would you pay more for the latter? This sort of intermingling is common, and every time I’ve seen it, the prices are the same. The store doesn’t even consider them to be separate products. They have the same bar code and ring up identically.
Barring difficulties with international borders or time zones, there is only one market for remote workers. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference if the remote employee is in Topeka or Manhattan. Why pay more for the latter?
The remote developer market is a piece of the developer market, and the developer market pays more for developers in SF than in Topeka, same as remote strawberries cost less (often because cost of labor is lower).
As a remote dev, you're competing with other remote devs who can out price you. If I can offer someone else 10k less for the same product, why wouldn't I?
We’re specifically talking about remote workers here. The fact that some companies pay more for non-remote people doesn’t really come into it. If you’re hiring remotely, it makes no sense to pay more for an equivalent employee who lives in a more expensive area.
If you have two offers, otherwise equal, and one pays more, will you refuse it because that offer is less than what you would have been paid in another location?
If you're a remote dev with skill x, unless you want to take less money, you're going to compete with the many more remote devs with skill x in other more expensive locations. So you accept less money because you can afford to, and that's better than no offer at all (because it went to a different person).
[1] - https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/
The crazy thing is there was a big market correction in the early 1900s. I’ve read it helped create the environment and had many of the same bad market actions that eventually brought about ‘29. History might rhyme sooner than later. There are definitely worrying trends too.
It's obvious on its face that a single number for all demographics in the country (or world?) is an absurd claim.
Good luck trying to raise a family out there, insurance, daycare, shelter & transportation. You might just have to eat a family member to survive.
If you want excellent people, you have to start by paying above-market anyways. No matter the role.
And by having a flat salary, you take out a big contributor of stress and distraction.
Of course, the question is what you do with those employees who's market rate is above the flat salary rate? Not sure how I would solve that, but I am sure there are better ways than going back to negotiating every salary independently.
I don’t think there are bad incentives from increasing mean of the pay distribution. But similar to the problems with minimum wage, this 70k wage minimum significantly compresses the distribution instead of just changing the mean.
This creates very bad long-term incentives for the company and employees.
Tech workers are paid incredibly well. Maybe that’s because we create so much value, but our ability to do so is partly due to luck and circumstance. Certainly, the poor sucker emptying the trash cans for minimum wage puts in more effort each day than I ever do, and the company needs them in order to operate just as much as they need me.
The relative need is entirely down to supply and demand. And while I greatly appreciate being part of a group with limited supply and great demand, I don’t see why this means I should object to other people getting more.
this is true but it glosses over an important distinction between skilled and unskilled labor. skilled positions in engineering and sales (just for example) require specific skills and probably some baseline aptitude that can't be quickly acquired. that is, you can't just assign your engineers some sales duties if it becomes too expensive to hire sales people, and most sales people can't just pick up engineering tasks if it's too expensive to hire more engineers.
in contrast, most able-bodied adults can learn to sweep, mop, etc. in a couple weeks. maybe extend it to a couple months if they need to use heavier equipment to clean a large space. this inherently puts a ceiling on the value of janitorial work. if janitor pay gets too close to pay for a skilled role, it's just not worth hiring the janitor anymore.
you can see this dynamic play out in restaurants and convenience stores. most businesses like these don't hire janitors, because they would have to pay them as much or more than they pay the waitstaff, cooks, or cashiers. instead, the normal employees are usually tasked with cleaning the workspace at the end of their shifts.
to be clear, I am not contesting your greater point. the fact that some people don't perform extremely valuable work doesn't mean it's okay to treat them like dirt; it doesn't make them less valuable as people. but the claim that a software company needs a janitor as much as it needs an engineer just isn't true.
I completely disagree with your statement at the end. The janitors are absolutely needed. Maybe you don’t need people with the title of “janitor” because your developers take care of that work too, but that just means they’re part-time janitors, not that you have no janitors. An office that actually has no janitors will rapidly become filthy and filled with trash.
You’re confusing need with ease of acquisition. It can look like companies don’t need janitors very much because they’re so easy to get. Companies don’t have to pay them well or treat them well because the supply is large and if you drive one away, there’s another one ready to take their place. But that doesn’t mean the need is low, it just means the supply is high.
As an analogy, consider: what are the greatest needs for an individual? You’d probably answer: food, shelter, companionship, maybe something like fulfilling work. I bet you didn’t answer “air.” Yet our need for air is perhaps our greatest need: without it, we die in just a few minutes. Why doesn’t that come to mind as a need? It’s because it’s so easy to obtain, we just don’t think about it.
Basic economics dictates that the difference in supply versus demand means developers will be able to command much higher salaries. Not because they’re needed more, but because they’re harder to get. The same reason a glass of champagne is more expensive than a glass of water, which is more expensive than a breath of air. If a company decides to pay their janitors more than the economics says they have to, that doesn’t mean that I should expect them to do the same thing for me as a developer.
Yea, I mean, that's kind of the point. You really have it backwards:
If you just multiply all salaries in society with 2, inflation will eat it all up.
In order to achieve a more equal society, you have to raise the lower salaries more than the higher ones.
Now, of course, you may say you don't WANT a more equal society, but ... ever wondered why US politics have become such a mess?
> this 70k wage minimum significantly compresses the distribution instead of just changing the mean.
That's the point, yeah? Like the whole point?
If I make the salary I ask for and am able to lead the life I want on it, then the fact that everyone else I work with is also getting a great salary is only a net positive in my book. The fact that the higher earners salaries were not affected at all means they suffered no harm except for those led by their ego.
"For a while, it wasn’t clear that the gamble was going to pay off. But eventually it did...."
I think the final page isn't yet written. NYT seems to be declaring the whole thing a success, but they are picking the timeframe for deciding when things are final. Let's give it 10 or 20 years, see where they are at.
I won't be unhappy if it's the same, but I will be surprised.
They said customers would know that the employees were "overpaid" and switch to another processor, although why this would work without those processors also being cheaper I never understood.
In this sense, the experiment is a success. At this point, it seems there will need to be a sudden change in the market to put them out of business, such as a very efficient provider with better customer service.
Nonetheless, most of what we pay in payments processing goes to parties like card issuers for their rewards programs and to the networks for their oligopoly rents. This means that the cost of the processor is relatively small. If they are making the kind of revenue that allowed this change in the first place, they will probably be able to keep making it until there is a real change in our processing system. That change would probably be regulation.
This is what's technically known as "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics".
Scandinavian countries are social democracies which very strongly embrace capitalism, and have strong social safety nets through taxation.
Socialism: the workers own the means of production
Communism: the state owns the means of production*
*Granted, what I was taught in history is that socialism is viewed as a halfway point where communism is the ultimate goal, and that communism should involve ownership by the workers rather than the state— pretty much always, however, the state ends up with ownership (otherwise it's hard to maintain order in a by-intrinsic-nature oppressive society).
If I'm wrong, please feel free to critique and offer some readings? :)
Both mean state control of the economy. One of them means paying people what the state thinks they need and requiring them to work how the state thinks they can, as opposed to other strategies like competitive market forces.
Whether or not one agrees that these countries were socialist (depends greatly on ones definition of socialism, but e.g. Marx argued that socialism was not a single ideology, but used it as a vague catch-all term and proceeded to criticise forms of socialism he saw as flawed or outright oppressive and reactionary; Engels later pointed out that they could never have written a "Socialist Manifesto" in 1848 because the term was used by too many people they strongly disagreed with, and was not radical enough), or whether or not they were trying to achieve communism, all of them at one time or other argued they were far away from achieving communism.
Point being that you have your terms reversed at very best. Communism implies the class struggle has ended, and a central idea of Marxism is that the state only exists as a political power for one class to oppress another, and that as a consequence ending the class struggle would make the state superfluous.
Under a purely Marxist view "the state" owning the means of production might represent a reasonable immediate outcome of a socialist revolution. With the caveat that in his works on the Paris Commune, Marx hailed the Commune as a demonstration of how a workers state could be the outcome of destroying the capitalist state, and criticised the Commune mostly for one thing: For not going far enough in destroying the older state to replace it with directly elected and recallable delegates.
But there are many other socialist ideologies as well, that do not ascribe to state ownership of the means of production - Marx wrote about some of them himself in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, it's not quite right to delineate them that way either. Marx never did.
In fact that separation of socialism and communism comes from the Bolsheviks seeking to justify their oppressive state with a "but we've only reached socialism so far" defense.
Through European history, we've seen universal healthcare and pensions and general welfare reforms come about largely as a result of the combined efforts of two groups: growing labour movements, and Christian democrats. In Germany Bismarck leaned on the Catholic party Zentrum, forerunners of the modern ruling centre-right CDU, and argued heavily from a point of view of Christian morality to get his reforms through.
In Norway, the first welfare reform was introduced in 1894, after Bismarcks model. After World War II, there was broad agreement across the board for welfare reforms, but it was first a broad coalition of centrist and centre-right forces that introduced the first major expansion of welfare: The Borten government, led by the agrarian "Centre Party", in coalition with Left (classic liberals), the Christian Peoples Party (centre right Christian democrats) and Right (classical small-c conservatives, which in Norway makes them the traditional right wing, but relatively moderate). They certainly got the support of the left, and the Labour Party subsequently expanded the welfare system, but the foundation of welfare in Norway like in most of the rest of the developed world was not a unilateral expansion of socialism but reflective of a combination of growing labour movements and Christian morality.
Some notable exceptions: In the UK, the Christian voter groups are split between Labour the Conservatives, for example, with internal factions in both causing tension.
What is unique about the Scandinavian model is not healthcare or higher pay per se, but the compressed pay scale. It's a bit embarrassing to earn "too much" in Norway, for example. Salaries ranges are much flatter.
But that is not just due to Scandinavia changing, but due to the rest of the world changing. Look at pre-Reagan America for example, and executive pays were a far lower multiple of the company averages.
As an old fart, and I've been in quite a different industry than the subject of the story, what has made a company successful is building a really desirable product in a growing market. People do a lot of handwaving about company cultures, quality of life, renumeration, but I think that building the right stuff will overwhelm practically any internal problems.
Edit: and of course the extreme, canonical example of this phenomenon is people who have no jobs but hold lots of stocks, which allows them to extract tremendous economic rents from their leverage as the owners of the land, machinery and organizations required to make the economy run, but without personally contributing any value at all.
You might argue that the excess value being produced by the cabbage harvester is being accrued by the consumer - that they are enjoying significant value from the cabbage that they aren't paying for. But I doubt that too - I'm almost certain that if the price of cabbage were to, say, double, that cabbage sales would plummet.
I'm not saying that jobs are not always compensated with their true value. You're right that frequently people extract much more or much less value than they produce. But I think that your example is not one of these, and I'm curious if there is research about how many* jobs actually fit this description.
If all the food harvesters of the world went on strike, how long would the human race last?
Whose job is more essential?
But to answer your question, total comp should be around 5% of the money you book for the firm. So salary + bonus.
and then everyone forgets it exists, and someone 5 years later does something completely different like form a "B-Corporation" to prove the exact same thing
> capitalism can have a heart
yet people are still trying to prove this instead of using established solutions. I would say this is mostly ignorance along side a sales pitch instead of merely being discontent with what is available
I don't see a reason the company would go down if they paid the 6 employees 1000 or 2000 per day. I don't know about you but if I want the cookies I don't give a flying fuck if they cost either 99 cents or 1 euro. Does this behavior change when one earns more than 35 euro per day? I think it only changes when one buys more than 10 000 boxes of cookies. Then that 1 cent would be woah 100 euro - unacceptibal!
I think the minimum wage should be designed by dedicated government committee based on the price of the product and the amount of customers served.
I currently work a minimum wage job cleaning trains. I serve some crazy number of customers (I guestimate 100 k daily) who pay 50-100 euro for a ticket. If they paid 5 cent extra the cleaners could earn 1000 euro per day. Sounds like a joke but people are already paying this for cleaning the real question is why they aren't getting what they paid for.
Its all culture, it has nothing to do with what things cost nor what they are worth. Its just like this idea that people doing brutal physical labor should also work 8 hours and work that job till they are 80 - as if that is even possible.
I really think we need a committee who with a serious face have to sign off on each job. Give them nice bonuses that they have to pay back if their estimates didn't work.