Employers who pay less than living wages require their workers to take public assistance to survive.
They literally steal from the public for their own profit. This annoys me to no end. I want to see those companies taxed/fined for every full time worker who is on public assistance as a penalty.
Anyone, including legislators, can look up the income guidelines to be eligible for a host of public benefits*
There’s no reason we as the public should be subsidizing Walmart and McDonalds and the rest.
*It does get a little complicated when you consider family size, as in, at what point would it be considered maybe okay if you worked full time and still qualified for benefits? If you have 8 kids the poverty income guidelines are around $44K, but many programs kick in at 200% of poverty guidelines. So would an employer be expected to pay someone nearly $90K bc they decided to have a lot of kids? Not saying I’m against it, but it’s where I start to see that creating a policy won’t be as easy as, “if you work full time and qualify, we’re punishing your employer.”
You can see for yourself on glassdoor, and I’ve pasted one example below, but the complaints are legion – $70k isn’t actually a high salary for Seattle, the high salary means low bonuses and other perks, crappy management using PR about this story to paper over other HR issues, etc. I have no idea if these are “real” reviews but they pass my smell test.
Beyond individual complaints, my point is that this is one of those “here’s one weird trick to fix capitalism” type clickbait stories that inevitably turn out to be more complicated. Reality is that if it made clear business sense to pay every employee $70k+, businesses would pay every employee $70k plus. They don’t because it doesn’t. A business who does is going to need to find other things to pull back to fund this PR stunt. Lowering the CEO’s salary makes great PR and is frankly the right thing to do, but is a PR stunt more than a real economic adjustment (especially since the CEO’s real money is likely to come from selling their equity at some point, not their cash salary).
Here’s one example review: “Accountability: This is a systemic issue that begins with Dan, the CEO, and trickles down to the rest of the company. A couple of examples I would cite are: If goals are missed, excuses are offered, and no changes are made. HR (called Team Advocates at Gravity) does not prepare people to manage, nor do they support or offer even the most basic training to new managers, TA is a puppet of leadership, not advocates for employees. No steps are taken to address this enormous problem.
Feedback: This is one of those elements that are critical to the success of a company. Well, it does not exist at Gravity. They want feedback, provided it is positive and aligns with how the C-Suite feels a company should be run. Offer feedback contrary to that and you will find yourself being left out of future discussions on the direction of the company. Persist, and you are likely to be forced out of the company. Managers do not provide actionable, concrete feedback to their people. It is all anecdotal in nature: “I keep hearing…” “You always…” “People are saying…”. There is a fear that is associated with giving feedback to your employees as a new manager, and as discussed earlier, TA offers no program or training to help prepare managers to have these conversations, so predictably, they do not happen.
Work-Life Balance: Non-existent. Work longer hours than anyone else and you will be rewarded here. Period. Leaders will tell you that you should take time for yourself and ensure that you are not burning yourself out. Then text/call your personal cell at all hours of the night and on the weekends. They will remind you that they pay a minimum of $70k for all roles (I am not sure why this still matters? It is not impressive at all for the Seattle area job market) and offer unlimited paid time off, though it is nearly impossible for many of the people here to take advantage of that. Additionally, know that your pay will be the first benefit they come for when the times get tough. If you need evidence of that, please reference the CEO’s social media posts. While it is great that they had to lay no one-off, this is another example of the C-suite avoiding the tough decision.
Pay: It is true that Gravity has committed to paying all employees a minimum of $70k, the rest of their pay structure and pay philosophy is terrible. Everyone and I do mean everyone at this company is underpaid. They avoid incentive-based pay because they do not want people who place a premium on their earning potential. The result is a sales organization that is mediocre at best when it comes to sales and lower than optimal headcounts for most teams other than sales. Ops teams are tragically understaffed and overworked and as a result, see high rates of turnover and burnout.
Development: This is the one that I really do not get. Every single one of the good people that I worked with who left this company gave feedback that there were no development opportunities at Gravity. Nothing is done about it. There are no clear outlines for career progression, no benchmarks, or companywide metrics to measure performance across teams. This company has hired some tremendous people, and then they do nothing to develop those people and take full advantage of all they are capable of. They simply throw people into the deep end and standby as those people drown.”
They do not. My BIL once called Stacey Abrams a Marxist… which… no. Hell, Bernie is not even a Marxist.
Except no, they would not. Paying starvation wages never makes good sense, and yet many, MANY corporations do that as a cost-saving measure, because people aren’t considered important compared to enriching the “leadership”. Running their businesses in a humane way is seen as counter to running companies to maximize profits. Even when treating employees better isn’t at odds with that.
We need a system that does not treat people as disposable wigets.
Totally fair. Changing the business environment would change what makes business sense and I would support that. However this case is more of a “one quick trick to fix capitalism” piece of clickbait than a legitimate alternative strategy.
That may be true, of course. But if the profile this company received in all this cause others to rethink how they compensate and treat their employees, and to do better, that’s not nothing.
Well, just base the numbers on the average, or the median, or something like that. Such as “a average family with 2.3 kids needs on average ${amount} to remain above the poverty line”, So minimum wage should be ${multiplier}*${amount}, with some rules about not restricting the hours to part time to avoid benefits requirements, etc.
Perhaps if we switched to a national health care system like the rest of the free world has, we wouldn’t need to worry about employer-bound health care, so companies would be less inclined to do tricks like part-timing/temping/gigging large portions of their workforce in order to avoid the benefits regulations. With the added bonus that far fewer people would be driven into poverty because of health-care costs.
Basically USA is Union Soviétique Américaine! It is full of dangerous commies!
Right, so you see what I meant when I said it’s not so simple? I agree that it’s doable. And a good, no, necessary goal. Yet, when people try to oversimplify it I cringe. I have been working on coordinating eligibility for housing-related programs between HUD, EPA and DOE(nergy) for (checks watch) oh, about 11 years now (and this effort started before I came on) and we’re almost there. 
No arguments from me there! Bring it on.
Well, as far as the employer obligations (minimum wage, restrictions against gaming the system to avoid paying benefits, etc) it can be simple – based on average family statistics (which should be tied in some way to the cost-of-living, so that it changes with inflation to prevent the whole stagnant wages problem).
When we get into situations of individual families that have more-than-average size, or need help with childcare expenses in order to work, or can only work reduced hours because of medical conditions or disabilities and the like (rather than having reduced hours only because the employer wants to avoid paying benefits), then those are the situations where welfare may need to come into play, which really should be the exception rather than the rule like it is now. But someone with an average sized family and no special needs, who otherwise can work full time should not be paid so little that they require welfare to get by, or need to juggle multiple part-time jobs hoping to get a full work-week in.
So yes, that is one review, and there are some others like it, but they’ve also got a more-than-respectable 4.1 rating overall. What’s striking is that the reviews are really polarized: almost nothing that isn’t either five stars or one. Maybe that’s due to fake reviews, maybe it’s just a polarizing work space, maybe the amount of positive press the place has gotten causes those dissatisfied to lash out a bit.
And again, not so simple. To be clear, I’m 100% behind living wages, but to oversimplify what this means for policy makers working in the world we have now is to obfuscate the real difficulties they face if trying to mold a humane and workable solution. If we tie wage requirements to cost of living, how do we monitor for employees that commute an hour or more to work in one place, but “enjoy” a lower cost of living where they actually live?
We could tie pay rates to the localities where the business is physically located. That might work. Then how and how often are median incomes and cost of living figures updated?
There are solutions, and we can figure it out. But, again, when I hear or see people acting as if it’s simple (in our current world), given my ongoing and heartfelt efforts on this front, I want to help people who seem Interested understand that there are a lot of factors at play.
There are surely ways to solve this, but none of them are simple, and all will have some follow-on effects.
IMO, the easiest solution is setting the baseline minimum wage at $25/hr right now. We can figure everything out after that. Knowing that most people will be able to get by…or at least have a fighting chance.
Combined with single-payer universal healthcare, that is a good start. Fact is, no matter what we pay people, shy of 7 figures/year, one catastrophic illness, even with employer-provided health insurance, can bankrupt an average family. It’s the most common, by far, cause of individual bankruptcy and home foreclosure in the US.
Right, without universal healthcare it’s all just bandaids.
There was a great story a few months ago on the radio comparing the experiences of one woman’s 2 friends both going through pregnancy and early motherhood simultaneously. But one was in Oregon and the other in, I want to say Sweden. The story covered the whole pregnancy and first year or so of motherhood, from medical stuff to job stuff to childcare.
It was stark how hard we make it for people compared to other places. Every. Step. Of. The. Way.
It would be (morbidly) interesting to know how much of Fox’s indignation arose purely from a loathing of poor people; and how much from the (typically also classist, since it never seems to be a concern when the plan is to pay a C-level more) inability to recognize that workers can be motivated by things other than fear of penury; most of which are fostered by an employer who isn’t trying to screw them.
Especially if your business is in one of the areas where skilled, experienced, employees are substantially more productive (certainly more or less anything software; probably a lot of skilled manufacturing and other areas) and it’s hard and/or counterproductive to try to Taylorize as a substitute for intrinsic motivation; you don’t even need to be particularly altruistic to recognize that trying to gouge relatively modest savings out of your relationship with your employees is a poor strategy. In the short term you can juice profits by cutting costs, sure; but ultimately you have to make money to have profits; and doing that gets harder when all your good people have their CVs dusted off and ready to jump ship and you are spending most of your time tyrannizing demoralized clock-punchers who hate working for you and are just trying to keep their heads down.
I don’t know anything about Gravity, but be careful about gleaning much from Glass Door. I’ve worked for some really great companies that have really awful reviews on there. Places like Glass Door attract the minority who had a bad experience at their job and have all manner of elaborate reasons for it. These are (in my experience as a manager) often the same people with shitty attitudes who are determined to see the worst in everything and blame everyone else for their failures to grow.
Glass Door is not a scientific or balanced survey of a company or how the people feel about it. It’s a self-selecting group of former employees with chips on their shoulders.
Again- this is not a comment about Gravity. I cannot speak to that. But I have had a decent sample size of comparing Glass Door reviews to actually working at the companies in question. This is a comment about the value (or lack thereof) of Glass Door as a company-evaluation tool.
If that’s someone’s primary motivation, they are in the wrong business. They should make a career change to pharmaceutical sales.
“Average” is such a pointless number, though. Where I am, $70k is a solid, middle class, home-owning wage. In Fairfax or other parts of NoVA it’s barely getting by. Which is why we have folks here who find commuting 90 min each way worthwhile. In a country this huge and diverse, the definition of “living wage” will vary dramatically. Which makes it easy for rightwingers to throw out examples that make any suggestion look bad.
True. And getting accurate data for any of these measures is tricky and expensive.
Median is difficult as well. And you could base it on median home costs, arguably an easier metric to get, but then we’re back at the family size discussion.
Like we said before, it’s doable, but people who pretend it’s “simple” generally haven’t spent that much time working on it.
Like was also previously said, none of this means anything without universal health care. Getting that would be life changing for us all.
