CEO Raising Everyone's Salary to at Least $70K

The process will be finished in 2024
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 26, 2019 2:13 AM CDT
CEO Opens New Office, Raises Minimum Pay to $70K
April Gracz, left, and Pano Giannakopoulos, right, work next to a wall displaying a company mission statement in the sales department at Gravity Payments.   (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

When Gravity Payments bought Boise, Idaho, firm ChargeItPro three years ago, the lowest-paid employees made $24,000 a year. That soon went up to $40,000—and Gravity CEO Dan Price says it will be $70,000 by 2024. To mark the opening of a new Boise Gravity office, which the ChargeItPro employees will be transferred to, Price told the 40 workers that the minimum salary will go up to $50,000 immediately, followed by $5,000 raises in each of the next four years, the Idaho Statesman-Journal reports. The CEO raised the minimum pay for all workers at the company's Seattle headquarters to $70,000 in 2015 after reading a study that said happiness and general emotional well-being significantly increases with pay rises up until around $75,000, CNN reports. He cut his own $1 million salary to the same level to help fund the pay rises.

Price says the Boise office is going to hire a significant number of call center workers, who will also receive a $70,000 salary by 2024. "Our competitors outsource those jobs to India and the Philippines and other places and offer very, very low wages, in some cases $2 to $3 or $4 an hour," he tells the Statesman Journal. "And that’s an important job." The road has not been entirely smooth for the credit card payment processing company since the pay raises began—some higher-paid employees quit, and Price was sued by his own brother, who co-founded the company—but the CEO says the business has prospered and it has been "really fantastic" to see a big rise in the number of employees who have started families and bought homes. (Price defeated his brother's lawsuit and now owns the entire company.)

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