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posted by takyon on Friday April 17 2015, @03:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the minimum-wage-maximum-happiness dept.

"Is anyone else freaking out right now? I'm kind of freaking out." said Dan Price, the CEO of Seattle-based Gravity Payments, as he announced that the new minimum salary for current employees will be raised to $70,000 a year. Price is taking a pay cut from $1 million to $70,000 and spending an appreciable amount of the company's profit to raise annual salaries from the current average of $48,000.

From the article:

The United States has one of the world's largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists' estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.

[...] Under a financial overhaul passed by Congress in 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission was supposed to require all publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of C.E.O. pay to the median pay of all other employees, but it has so far failed to put it in effect. Corporate executives have vigorously opposed the idea, complaining it would be cumbersome and costly to implement.

[...] The happiness research behind Mr. Price's announcement on Monday came from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. They found that what they called emotional well-being — defined as "the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience, the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant" — rises with income, but only to a point. And that point turns out to be about $75,000 a year.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @04:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @04:03AM (#171876)

    I think it is one of the best ideas for shareholders I've heard of in a long while. Nothing puts short term gains in the head of a ceo than golden parachutes

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @04:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2015, @04:10AM (#171878)

    He owns the company with his brother and has done so since he was 19.