US$70,000. Imagine earning that when you got your first job. It's the minimum that everyone will be paid at a company in Seattle as of 2017 - the announcement was made in April.
To fund this, the chief executive and founder is slashing his pay by 90 per cent, with salaries going up to $50,000 or up by $5,000 straight off the bat, whichever is greater. The average salary there was $48,000.
German-owned Lidl this week became the first supermarket in the United Kingdom to pay its staff the living wage - a measure that calculates the basic cost of life in the UK and is higher than the minimum wage set by law.
Contrast this with a company based in the UAE that, concerned it might be paying support and administration staff too little to afford life in the UAE, compared salaries with counterparts in the UK, only to find that their staff here were on par. This prompted a collective sigh of relief, with the key well-being issue seemingly addressed and off the agenda.
But it isn't. When people can't earn enough to have a dignified life - or worry themselves sick (literally) because of money issues, things are not OK. When people can no longer work their way out of poverty or sleep well at night, things are not OK.
This is what I really wanted to talk about - with the chief executive of the company that invited me to give a financial well-being workshop to staff as part of their well-being week.
There's a lot of well-being in taking the financial strain out of life. It empowers people to focus on their jobs instead of being distracted by the ever-present mental maths of figuring out how to make ends meet when their pay doesn't cover the real cost of basic life.
Team-building and getting staff together with the hope of making them feel counted, appreciated and valued is all fine and dandy. But the bottom line is that if they're distracted by money worries, then the focus is all wrong and these exercises are a waste of time. Their cost would be better spent on copying what Lidl just did.
How about the minimum wage being the living wage - and a bit more?
This is what Dan Price of Gravity Payments did. He's the chief executive who said everyone at his company would be on $70,000 in two years. He did this after reading a study about happiness. It stated that additional income had a major effect on people's emotional well-being - up to a point. Up to $75,000 in earnings to be precise. Beyond this level, more money doesn't have the same effect on us. The idea is that this amount covers life's important expenses. More can give us pleasure - like going on a luxury holiday of your choice or buying nice things - but doesn't feed into our core well-being.
The other thing that hurts us is income inequality - the difference between what you earn and someone else does. This causes a giant dent in our emotional well-being. I'm sure it's the topic of many a water-cooler conversation you've been privy to.
And it can be enormous. Think about this - various studies put chief executive's wages in the United States at 300 times that of average staff. No wonder there's discontent on the shop floor.
It's a far cry from the 20 to 1 ratio that Peter Drucker - the acclaimed founder of modern management - advocated.
Mr Price seemed to hit the nail on the head for both issues with his Robin Hood solution. But it turns out that he didn't.
Here's another nugget Drucker came up with - the most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
Unfortunately for Mr Price, he appears to be suffering the consequences of not heeding this. Mr Price cut his salary to raise the standard of living of many around him. It's said he has lost key staff as a result. Why? Because there's more to all this than simple, linear, collective maths. While we don't want chief executives earning 300- odd times the average worker's pay, we still want what we believe is equitable, fair pay.
In a nutshell: if two unequally skilled staff are paid equally, there's a problem.
Pay and pay rises count. As you know, this kind of "who gets paid for what" situation can get messy and ugly. Turns out people want to have reference and comparison points, and be able to see clearly how they fit into the work-pay-reward matrix.
For everyone to be happy at Gravity, it appears that the higher-skilled, higher-paid staff would need to have an increase in their pay in keeping with what the lower-paid staff are getting. Remember, Mr Price raised everyone up to $50,000, no matter their previous wage, and gave those already earning more $5,000 on top. Some of his skilled, dedicated top earners didn't feel this was fair - for them - and left.
Pity. Just when I thought there was a benevolent, capitalist solution in the making.
Nima Abu Wardeh is the founder of the personal finance website cashy.me. You can reach her at nima@cashy.me and find her on Twitter at @nimaabuwardeh.
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