Dan Price

Attention CEOs:

I'm one of you. In 2015 I made 33x more than our lowest-paid employee.

I took a big pay cut & raised our minimum wage to $70k. Now our top exec makes 4x more than our lowest-paid employee.

In that span, our business tripled. Amazing what happy employees can do.

pets love work from home!

Many people use my story (voluntarily cutting my CEO pay to give all workers at least $70,000) as evidence capitalism works. “He did it on his own,“ they say.
No! It proves it doesn't work. It's been six years and not one big company followed suit. Corporations will never voluntarily do the right thing.

I was raised in a conservative, business-first household. I thought if I proved that paying employees more worked, others would follow suit in the spirit of the “free market.“
Now I realize how naive I was. I think about how corporations used child labor until it was outlawed. More recently, I think about how “gig“ companies like Uber and DoorDash decline to give workers a minimum wage or basic protections because they don't have to.

When we first started our minimum wage, big companies said it would never work. Now that it has, they've shifted to saying “that's nice, but it'll never work for us.“ There is always an excuse to value profits over people, especially when the system is set up to incentivize corporations to chase short-terms gains at the expense of humanity.

CEO pay
Chipotle: $38 million
Burger King/Popeyes: $20 million
Starbucks: $14.7 million
Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/KFC: $14.6 million
McDonald's: $10.8 million
Olive Garden: $8.7 million
Wendy's: $7.2 million
Papa John's: $6.4 million
Domino's: $6.3 million
Cracker Barrel: $6.2 million
Wingstop: $6 million
Jack in the Box: $5.9 million
Cheesecake Factory: $5.9 million
Chili's: $5.9 million
Outback Steakhouse: $5.6 million
Denny's: $5.3 million

but yes your order costs more because of $1/hour worker raises

In the pandemic:
Postmates sold for $2.6 billion
GrubHub is being sold for $7 billion
DoorDash paid its CEO $410 million
Uber Eats revenue is up 152%

They charge restaurants 30% fees (even setting up ghost delivery websites without the restaurant's knowledge). They don't pay drivers minimum wage, benefits or any paid time off.

If you can, support restaurants directly.

A frustrated friend who recruits management positions for a retail chain just called me. She told me her employer said she could pay max $19/hour if she promoted someone internally, but could pay up to $30/hour hiring from the outside.

If you think this is moronic, you are absolutely not wrong.

Advice for employees in 2021?

Be on the lookout for other job opportunities, talk to other employees about what you make and encourage them to do the same, talk about how the compensation negotiations went - what worked and didn't.

Employees are stronger fighting back together

When the pandemic first hit, our revenue fell 50% and our employees volunteered pay cuts. In solidarity I cut my CEO pay to $0.

As soon as we rebounded last summer, we paid them back. Now we're handing out raises again, so I decided to go back to my normal $70k salary.

I prioritized paying workers first because CEOs don't make companies, employees do.

It's always “$600 checks two years ago and 50-cent raises for workers are causing inflation“

and never “$3 trillion from the Fed to bail out the stock market, $1 trillion in annual corporate stock buybacks and a 1,322% rise in CEO pay since 1978 are causing inflation“

I don't have any student loans.

Yes, I worked hard to be debt-free. But I still want student loans canceled because I want the next generation to have better opportunities than mine had. I'm not sure why, but at some point, this became a controversial statement.

(and yes, we should also fix the rising cost of college over the long term, but that shouldn't preclude us from taking this step right now)

We canceled non-essential meetings at our company today. We know it's going to be a day full of emotions and many people will need space, and there are some things that are more important than business. Anyone that wanted the day off with pay got it.

Give money to a billionaire and they'll hoard it in a low-tax offshore account.

Give money to a worker and they'll spend it locally.

This isn't that hard. We tried trickle-down economics for decades and it never worked. We need to try trickle-up economics.

Christmas if it worked like U.S. capitalism:

*1 kid gets all the toys

*He shares a couple stuffed animals & is hailed as a noble philanthropist

*He bribes elves to write laws saying he will always get all toys

*Other kids ask where their toys are & are called ungrateful & lazy

Workers around the world: lost $3.7 trillion in the pandemic.
Billionaires around the world: gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemic.

It's the biggest one-year wealth transfer in history, yet somehow barely anyone is talking about it.

17 years ago today I started our company, Gravity Payments, at 19 years old. Our employees surprised me with a card they all signed. Their messages moved me to tears.

What I'm most proud of as CEO? We proved to the world that treating employees first works.

As a small business, we pay a higher tax rate than Amazon, all because we don't have an army of lobbyists and lawyers to fight for us. Our revenue is 0.01% of Amazon's.

Politicians of all types love to say they support small businesses and the free market. Tell me, how is that fair?

*fills up car on way to $10/hour part-time job with no health care or retirement plan after dropping kids at $1,500/month child care while servicing $30k in student debt and paying $250 rent hike in neighborhood where home prices are up $100k*

“man, these gas prices are killing me“

I keep hearing big companies say they can't afford to pay workers more. But I haven't heard a single one even consider cutting their CEO's $20 million salary. In fact, CEO pay at big companies grew an average of $500,000 last year.

I slashed my CEO salary to pay every worker a living wage. Then our profits grew because happier employees made our company better.

Employees make companies, not CEOs.

Meta Operating Profit

2012: $.5 billion
2015: $6 billion
2018: $25 billion
2021: $46 billion
2022: CEO Zuckerberg screws up, revenue declines

11,000 people are fired by him.

Even at the richest and most successful companies in the world, American workers cannot earn security from layoffs.

Walton family fortune
5 years ago: $117 billion
Now: $216 billion

Walmart minimum wage
5 years ago: $10 an hour
Now: $11 an hour (a decrease when adjusted for inflation)

The cycle: Low-wage workers get food stamps➝spend their benefits at Walmart➝Waltons get richer➝repeat

“closed due to staffing shortage“

translation: “closed due to being cheap“

If we just collected all the taxes the 1% owes but doesn't pay, we'd have $1.75 trillion over a decade.

The cost to wipe out student debt is $1.7 trillion.

Stop saying we can't afford things and start asking why we refuse to do anything to inconvenience the rich or help people.

I am back to work full-time at Gravity Payments, the company I founded over 20 years ago. I'm in a new role advising and assisting the CEO on strategy. It's been great to be back 👍

“Corporations are going through a tough time right now“

Let's examine this together:

They laid off staff in 2020 and had an excuse to cut people at a terrible time for those folks and save money “we had no choice.“

They received generous Government bailouts that overall made them more than whole and got out of any serious commitments that should have went with the assistance by lobbying.

They are using the dual myths of “great resignation“ and “labor shortage“ to understaff and making vague gestures they will hope are seen as attempts to fix it. They are actually highly satisfied.

With their understaffing, they excuse themselves to overwork people that don’t have a great option to get out or just can't take the risk. Trapping people in a terrible job that gets worse every day.

They use the myth of “inflation“ to raise prices. After they raise prices, they point to the fact that they did as proof of the “inflation.“

What's the result? Corporate profits are at an all time high.

Source:

The average CEO at a big company made more on the first work day of the year than their median worker makes all year.

Average CEO pay: $21.3 million - $81,600 every work day
Pay for their workers: $66,800 all year

CEOs at big companies make more in six weeks than you will make in your entire life.
High school grad lifetime earnings: $1.3 million
College grad lifetime earnings: $2.3 million
CEO earnings every six weeks: $2.5 million

As a CEO who owes everything to our workers, I will never understand this. A lot of CEOs work hard. But so do most workers. Yet at most big companies, only execs share in the wealth that they both create. And when the going gets tough - like right now - only the workers are affected, through layoffs and pay cuts.

Sources: Economic Policy Institute, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

I am not a successful CEO.

I am a regular person who has 200 spectacular coworkers who drive our company forward every day.

I would be a huge failure without them, and I never forget that.

Five years ago, I cut my salary by over 90% so Gravity Payments could pay a $70k minimum wage. Since then our business has grown and our employees have improved their lives by starting families, buying homes, paying off debt, and living free of financial worry.

But as I told CBC As It Happens, despite our success, income inequality is getting worse. Why don't more CEOs realize that paying people more is better than taking home a huge salary or squeezing profits to please investors? Can someone explain it to me?

https://lnkd.in/gJjX_Bg

Rail companies in 2021 versus 2001:

$20 billion operating profit in 2021, up 300%

Employee expense down (real dollars)

$100 billion paid out to investors during that time

These rich railroad barons don't have enough class to afford guaranteed sick leave, fair working conditions, or needed safety improvements?

In March my company made news when our employees voluntarily took temporary 20% pay cuts to ensure 0 layoffs.

Our situation has improved and I just announced to our employees that everyone will be paid back in full - at a personal cost of about $750,000. They saved our company and deserve it.

(for those who missed it - here's the original backstory on the pay cuts at Gravity Payments https://lnkd.in/g_86Cvh)

45% of Amazon warehouse workers are injured during the Prime Day rush. The company has industry-leading injury rates.

Amazon also makes over $30 billion a year in profit and Jeff Bezos is worth $215 billion.

This Prime Day I'm supporting local businesses when possible.

*man has a child*
Company: “We must pay him more so he can provide for his family“

*woman has a child*
Company: “She's going to be too distracted to work - we'll give her a lower-paying job“

How my small business survived the recession and a 30% revenue loss with 0 layoffs:
1. Employees took pay cuts to save each others' jobs. I cut my CEO pay to $0 in solidarity.
2. Inspired employees drove up sales a record 31%
3. We used that new revenue to pay back all the pay cuts
Studies show layoffs are short-sighted and kill businesses long-term. Keeping everyone on staff was not only the right thing to do, it helped save our business.

One other key point: In the 2009 recession, we lost 20% of our revenue. Since then we saved up that amount to prepare for the next inevitable recession. Unlike big corporations that used all their money on stock buybacks and dividends instead of saving up for a rainy day - and then got bailed out anyway - small businesses don't have that luxury.

Read more in my new Washington Post op-ed:

We have a job opening that is pretty rare for us: working directly with me to help promote our message of economic justice around the world while helping small businesses save money. No specific experience required. And it's remote.
Apply today!