Giving Compass' Take:

• Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, reduced his salary and increased his employees' minimum annual salaries to pursue wage justice within his organization and hopefully encourage others to follow suit. 

• Unfortunately, this wage increase happened five years ago, and other companies have yet to follow in Price's footsteps. Would it have been more influential for him to take the philanthropic route? 

• Understand more about what is defined as a living wage. 

Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments in Seattle, Washington, says he is happier than ever since he slashed his own salary from $1.1 million to $70,000 five years ago and raised the minimum annual salaries of his staff to the same $70,000 level. The sour note in the whole scenario, he says, is that others have not followed suit.

“I can’t really fully declare it a success,” he says, “because in the five years since we’ve implemented our living wage program, income inequality, wealth inequality, and just the disparity of power between the wealthiest and the most powerful and everybody else has continued to grow in an alarming way.”

At the time, there was a huge backlash to what some quarters saw as cultural heresy. Rush Limbaugh called him a communist, his brother and co-founder sued him, and a couple of senior Gravity employees quit in protest over what they saw as unjustifiable raises.

Rosita Barlow, director of sales says everyone is working hard. “When money is not at the forefront of your mind when you’re doing your job, it allows you to be more passionate about what motivates you,” she says. Meanwhile, not only has the company grown, but his employees are doing things that were previously out of reach—buying homes, starting families, and paying down their debts.

Price says a colleague suggested that if he did business in a more traditional way, he could become rich and dole out money philanthropically. “He’s telling me that the world needs another billionaire philanthropist, and I just don’t know if that’s the case. Because we’ve been relying on billionaire philanthropists for so long, and I don’t really think that’s working out very well for us.”

Read the full article about wage justice by Ruth McCambridge at Nonprofit Quarterly.