what happened to the company that paid everyone 70000

Dorsum in 2015, Dan Toll of the credit card processing company Gravity Payments decided to pay everyone at his visitor a minimum salary of $lxx,000 a twelvemonth, including himself. In the immediate aftermath, but two long-time employees left the company (out of 120 people), and Rush Limbaugh called it, "a case study in MBA programs on how socialism does not work."

While Price himself cut his salary down from $i million to match the $seventy,000 he was paying his employees, it turned out he was also nearly to be embroiled in a lawsuit with his business partner and brother, who claimed that Cost was receiving "excessive" compensation. (Although Cost prevailed in the lawsuit, there was undoubtedly at least some PR motivation backside the motion.)

Five years afterward, the company still has an impressive employee retention charge per unit of over 90 percent, and is still profitable. Then coronavirus messed everything up, similar it did for anybody, with minor business transactions—the bulk of Gravity'due south business—dropping by more than l percent practically overnight. And that'south where the story of a socialist Seattle credit card processing company gets more interesting.

From The Toronto Star:

In a short time, Gravity lost about half of its acquirement, which mainly comes from small businesses, hardest hit by the crisis.

In early April, Dan Toll, i of the company founders and its CEO, convened the 200 employees for an urgent Zoom telephone call, sharing with them the fact that the visitor was called-for $1.5 1000000 a month in cash. If information technology continued similar this and no activity was taken, Price warned, the company would run out of cash in just four months.

[…]

"Ninety-viii per cent of the employees agreed to cut their wages," he tells me in a Zoom interview from Seattle. "Ten wrote that they were willing to work for complimentary, and several dozen offered a fifty per cent reduction in their wages.

"When I saw it, I was and so moved, that tears flowed from my eyes."

Gravity adopted the solution proposed by the workers, with slight modifications. No employee'southward salary was reduced past more than half, and for those who earned less than $100,000, the maximum reduction was 30 per cent.

By July 2020, the company had stabilized, and began paying back all the employees who had sacrificed their income.

In any other business, I'd be creeped out by the notion of workers sacrificing for the boss like that. Just it sounds similar Toll may have really succeeded in building a team who believed in their mission, and viewed their company as a worker-owned co-op. And that is pretty impressive, especially since they're working at a financial transaction company run by a guy named Price.

Dan Price appear a minimum salary of $lxx,000 to all of his 120 employees back in 2015. It paid off large time [Amir Barnea / Toronto Star]

Gravity Payments employees volunteer to have pay cut as revenue drops 50% during COVID-19 crunch [Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire]

The CEO Paying Everyone $seventy,000 Salaries Has Something to Hibernate [Karen Weise / Bloomberg]

Image: Whym/Wikimedia Eatables (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

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Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/24/whatever-happened-to-the-company-that-decided-to-pay-all-of-its-employees-a-70k-minimum-wage.html

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