Dan Price Is the Nutty CEO America Needs (But Doesn’t Deserve)
ChargeItPro employees earning the company's minimum salary have received an immediate $10,000 raise, thanks to CEO Dan Price. | Source: Inc/YouTube
ChargeItPro employees earning the company’s minimum salary have received an immediate $10,000 raise. The five-figure increase will be tacked on to the $40,000 the Idaho-based payment processing company’s lowest-earning employees currently make. Additionally, the startup announced plans to increase all employee salaries to a new minimum of $70,000.
The news comes after ChargeItPro was acquired by Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments — with the latter company’s CEO, Dan Price, announcing the pay raises.
Dan Price Slashes Own Pay to Reward Employees
Price previously announced a $70,000 minimum salary for employees in his Seattle office in 2015 — during which time he reportedly took an 80-90 percent pay cut from his own salary.
He told ABC News yesterday:
“I took between an 80 and 90 percent pay cut, and our chief operating officer took about an 80 percent pay cut, and our executive team absolutely makes less than what other companies would pay. It absolutely is coming out of executive pay, it’s an investment, I think we’ve proven that it can work.”
Taking Action Against Income Inequality
Price’s generosity comes in stark contrast to the widening wealth gap in the United States, in which corporate executives tend to make significantly more than lower-level employees and not dole out such healthy bonuses.
A Bernie Sanders-commissioned federal report published last month found that disparities in income and wealth among older households have increased over the past three decades. States the report :
“In 2016, households in the top quintile had estimated average income of $398,000, compared to about $53,000 for the middle quintile and about $14,000 for the bottom quintile.”
Inequality.org also notes that the United States’ top 10 percent make nine times more, on average, than the bottom 90 percent.
Americans in the top percentile, meanwhile, average over 39 times more income than the bottom 90 percent.
Those at the apex of the income pyramid who lay claim to the country’s top 0.1 percent make 188 times more than the bottom 90 percent.
These kinds of statistics disturb Price, who explained:
“I’m kind of heartbroken right now by the vast consolidation of wealth and power that’s happening, and in addition how that’s affecting our decisions around climate. I’m sick of being part of the problem, I want to be part of the solution. Previously, I was making a million dollars a year and people working for me were making $30,000 a year and that’s wrong, I was feeding into the problem.”
Dan Price: ‘The Inequality Needs to Stop’
Furthermore, Price believes there is no excuse for why other wealthy companies in corporate America do not follow his lead and offer more generous pay to their employees at the expense of executive salaries, stating:
“Any company that is making over a million dollars a year in profit absolutely should be doing this. The inequality needs to stop.”
Clearly, Dan Price is the CEO America needs. Unfortunately, he’s not the one that we deserve.
