LOCAL NEWS
Seattle CEO who enacted $70k minimum salary cuts own pay to $0
Mar 30, 2020, 9:51 AM
Gravity Payments. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price — who famously enacted a $70,000 minimum salary for all his employees — has now cut his own pay to $0 as the company has struggled with losses amidst the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
Seattle company continues expansion of $70,000 minimum salary
Price hopes this move will ensure that no Gravity employees are laid off, with the company’s Chief Operating Officer Tammi Kroll also cutting her pay down to zero from $275,000.
“It’s not much but it’s what I can do. We’ll get through this together,” Price said on Twitter over the weekend.
5 years ago I cut my CEO pay from $1.1M to $70k so I could pay all my employees at least $70k.
That's not good enough anymore.
Today I cut my pay to $0. I'm committed to laying off 0 of our employees.
It's not much but it's what I can do. We'll get through this together.
— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) March 28, 2020
Gravity has enacted a hiring freeze in the meantime — the first time it’s done so in over a decade — with Price estimating that the company has lost over half of its business in recent days. Even so, he also said that he is considering a contractor program “for sales leads to help us grow.”
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He went on to label this the “biggest challenge we have ever faced,” as the company continues to search for ways to stay afloat and keep its employees on board in the days ahead.
Gravity first raised its salary minimum in Seattle to $70,000 in 2015, when Price opted to cut his $1.1 million yearly pay down to $70,000 to fund the move. In the year’s since, Price has garnered the attention of everyone from other CEOs, to former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
The company now boasts over 200 total employees across both Seattle and Boise. In the years since the $70,000 salary minimum, Price has pointed to an increase in employees who have had children, a 10 percent increase in employees who bought a home, and a doubling of 401k contributions.
