Must read the entire article.
Great reporting!
The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide
Inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price.
By Karen Weise | December 1, 2015
From Bloomberg Businessweek
It seemed too good to be true.
On April 13, with reporters from the New York Times and NBC News hovering nearby, Dan Price, the young chief executive officer of Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit card processing company, told his staff he was
raising their minimum salary to $70,000 a year.
Some employees would see their wages double.
There was more:
He planned to cut his own $1.1 million compensation to help cover the cost.
The idea came to him, he’d later tell the media, after talking to a friend who earned less than he did. He’d read about a study showing that extra income improves the happiness of people who earn less than about $75,000.
“It’s not about making money; it’s about making a difference,” Price told the Today Show, one of two dozen TV interviews he did in the days following the announcement.
Price’s story rocketed around the world, a capitalist fairy tale to counter growing inequality.
With his tousled long hair and dark brown eyes, Price combined Brad Pitt’s smolder and Boo Boo Bear’s aw-shucks demeanor to become an articulate and attractive messenger...
...
But there’s a problem with all those scenarios: The lawsuit predates the raise.
Lucas did file the case two weeks after Price’s announcement, but according to court records, Price was served with the suit at his house on the afternoon of March 16—about two weeks before the fabled hike with his friend and almost a month before the wage increase announcement.
Washington state allows litigants to serve a defendant before a suit is filed with the court.
Hollon, Lucas’s attorney, says Price informed his brother of the pay hike through an e-mail on April 9, only four days before the New York Times and NBC descended on Seattle.
If the lawsuit wasn’t a reaction to the wage hike, could it have been the other way around?
After all, Price announced his magnanimous act a month after his brother sued him for, in essence, being greedy.
Lowering his pay could give Price negotiating leverage, too.
“With profits, at least in the short term, shifted to salaries, there is little left over to buy out his brother,” the New York Times reported Price said.
...In a follow-up interview in mid-November, I pressed Price about the inconsistency.
How could what he told me about being served two weeks after announcing the raise be true when the court records indicated otherwise?
...
One aspect of Price’s saga is certain: Seventy employees at Gravity now earn far more than they did before.
Was it altruism or a costly lawsuit that motivated it?
If his book doesn’t provide answers, perhaps Lucas’s case, which goes to trial in May, will.
"Nevertheless, progressive leftist anti-life Democrats, and the Democrat Media Complex, immediately began politicizing the murders as an opportunity to silence their political opponents, claiming that rhetoric from those in the pro-life movement somehow triggered the episode (even though they have zero evidence).
