Anyone see the article last month about the Seattle company
that brought the minimum wage of its employees up to $70K? If you read the New
York Times on a regular basis – or any other major nationally syndicated U.S.
newspaper, for that matter – then this story may be familiar to you.
The company in question is called Gravity Payments.
Apparently Gravity Payments is a credit-card processing company that provides
financial services for other companies that want to accept credit cards. But what
the company does – i.e. how its business practices affect the economic order
and society – is apparently of little interest to the mainstream media outlets
that have made a story out of this. What gets everyone’s attention is that the company’s
good-guy CEO – a good looking young-thirties white dude with quasi-messianic long
hair and a beard – is the perfect poster-child for next-gen tech and financial
businesses that care. More on this
later.
The New York Times piece, which was published to the NYT
website at the tail end of July, certainly isn’t the first to address Gravity
Payments’ pay raise. Dan Price, the man behind the company – as the NYT would
have us believe, the one-man, Steve Jobsian brains-behind-the-operation
visionary who single-handedly made the company into a marvelous success – announced
earlier this year that he was raising his company’s minimum wage to $70,000.
Numerous articles were written about the increase soon after it happened. In
April, the story popped up in Forbes, USA Today, the Washington Post, virtually
everywhere else you would expect.
The NTY article from late July was supposed to put a new
spin on the already-worn story by highlighting challenges that the company has faced since implementing the wage
increase. The idea, I think, was to problematize the idealized image of the
company a little bit – or pretend to, anyway. A few sober considerations are
presented to complicate otherwise rosy picture that Mr. Price paints – for
instance, highly qualified and hard-working employees naturally thought it was unfair for everyone in the company to get
an across-the-board raise. But most of the “challenges” the company has faced
are hardly roadblocks – angry letters from concerned conservative businessmen
who think that instituting a high minimum wage will have ruinous consequences,
that sort of thing.
None of the discussion of challenges really matters, though,
because the real point of the article is to give Mr. Price a platform for
shutting down his critics. Most of the article (and, if you are reading on the
website, the accompanying video clip) consists of select quotes from Mr. Price,
and there is little in the way of contrapuntal reporter commentary. The reader
(or viewer, if you just watch the clip) is supposed to walk away knowing that Price
is a great guy who courageously fends off neoconservative nuts in the pursuit
of economic justice . . . or something like it. In fact, even Price’s failure
to anticipate the contentious consequences of wage hike does not much besmirch
our image of him as a visionary– on the contrary, his sort of youthful,
confident-yet-bashful naivete only makes him more endearing.
And this should all be great, right? Isn’t this what we want
– a heroic technocratic bringing wealth to the masses?! A scion of business
with a vision for tackling income inequality – the biggest problem of our age,
if you believe such illustrious modern-day liberal prophets as Paul Krugman and
Thomas Picketty – through doing
business. This is exactly what we need, isn’t it?
Whether Mr. Price has what we need or doesn’t, his way of
doing business certainly satisfies a certain craving. Indeed, articles like
this one are like crack to the dominant “liberal” establishment – the so-called
progressives who are mostly white, mostly quite high income, and mostly
concentrated in fancy finance cities like NYC and tech hubs like San Francisco and
Seattle. Really, what is disturbing about the article isn’t about the economics
or the politics. All things considered, what Price did for his employees was
highly commendable. What is problematic is everything in the background, all
the privilege and race and class inequalities that the article treats as given and thereby implicitly perpetuates. And
though little of it is overt, you don’t have to be very astute to recognize
clear as day that the political philosophy being peddled by the NYT and the establishment
it serves does more to prop up the inequality-producing capitalist machine than
it does to challenge.
Without getting into tremendous detail about any of the
background presuppositions in particular – I’m sure they’ll be plenty of
opportunities for that in the future – here are some observations that should some
light on what this article is supposed to do.
(1) Missing the bigger picture. Little to
no attention is paid to what Gravity Payments is, or does. Of course if the
authors of the piece were legitimately
concerned about the inequality, then you think it would be worth commenting at
some length on the fact that Gravity Payments is part of the credit industry.
Now it is certainly possible that Gravity Payments has a model that sets it
apart from other financial and credit institutions that makes it much more
grassroots-friendly than your typical player in that universe. The company
website seems to suggest just this, promising that Gravity can empower
smaller-scale enterprises to use credit card services that otherwise might not
be able to afford to do so. But however you slice it, we are talking about a
company that is part of the financial industry here. And there is fairly
widespread consensus – including among dominant liberal economists, not to
mention their more radical brethren – that the financial industry is to blame
for much of the inequality that afflicts our modern world. So why doesn’t the
NYT address this – or even so much as comment on the irony? Probably because the
NYT knows its readership – mostly white so-called “progressives” who rail
against income inequality but work predominantly in the legal, financial, and
other sectors that prop up our current economic system. Articles like this
function as a way to resolve the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise tear
apart wealthy progressives. How do you reconcile your high economic position
with your purportedly humble politics? Worry not! For you can be fabulously
attractive, successful, and yes, wealthy, and still be a social justice warrior
(you know, the kind who, like Mr. Price, know how to deal a “swashbuckling blow
against income inequality”) so long as you deploy
your wealth in the socially correct fashion. And never mind how you got your
money . . . what matters is what you do with it. Which brings us to the next:
(2) The faux-sacrifice. We are supposed to
love Price and applaud his wage hike in large part because he (sort of) paid
for this from his own pocket. As it goes, it seems that Price brought his own
yearly income down to $70,000 from somewhere near $1M a year when he opted to
raise his employees’ income to the same. Truth be told, the fact that Price voluntarily relinquished the lion’s
share of his wages so that his employees could earn more is quite laudable. But
the article’s attempts to paint all of this as selfless martyrdom is frankly
insulting to normal wage-earners out there. First, as the article makes clear,
Price’s net worth is well into the millions of dollars, which means that the
income he continues to draw from his company is essentially irrelevant . . .
unlike most of us, Price is financially secure for life and he needn’t lift a
finger to keep things that way. And though his income has been artificially
restricted, Price is presumably still one of the principal holders of the
company’s equity. So whatever Price’s current income may be, it is
unquestionable that his wealth has
been little affected by his purported sacrifice. Nonetheless, the article would
have you believe that Price is really struggling to get by since he took this
self-imposed hit . . . as we learn, Price hasn’t earned such a small yearly
salary (which is nearly double the
median family income in the United States, mind you) since he was in his early
twenties! (If you watch Price’s interview, you hear this as Price is shown
exercising in what appears to be his own personal gym. Such suffering.) It’s
understandable that the NYT wants to show us how much Price has given up to
make his vision work – we’re supposed to see what a great person he his. But
shouldn’t the reader get a little context here? Shouldn’t the NYT reader be
reminded every now and then that $70,000 is actually quite a lot of money for
most people. In fact most American families get by on much less.
(3) Everyone in the video interview is white
and (apparently) white-collar. In the video interview accompanying the
article on the NYT website, there is a scene showing Price speaking to a room
full of forty or fifty of his company’s employees. It is hard not to notice
that virtually everyone in the room is white. I don’t think this point should
be overstated – there is nothing to suggest that Price or the NYT reporter are
racist in their hiring or filming practices. But the demographic profile of the
people in the video is worth considering for several other reasons. First,
however fantastic Price’s wage increase may be for his employees, those
employees do not appear to constitute a representative sample of society. And
the unfortunate reality is that other successful up-and-coming West Coast
companies that might be likely to implement mandatory minimum wages similar to
Price’s are likely to have a very similar racial makeup to Gravity. Unfortunately,
this means that, from a racial and economic justice standpoint, these benefits
will largely accrue to people from an already socially (if not necessarily
economically) privileged background. Now if we could get some bigger companies
with a more diverse employee base (think McDonald’s or Burger King) to sign up
for the $70K minimum wage plan, then we’d be talking!
Aside form (though related to) the
question race, it is also worth noting that all the “employees” in the video
are white collar workers of some type or other. There might be a few
receptionists in the mix, but there does not appear to be anyone from the
janitorial staff, for instance. Why is this significant? One reason may be
that, to the extent Gravity is serviced by such personnel, they very likely are
not company employees. Likely they are hired on as independent contractors;
perhaps they work for some other company that almost certainly doesn’t pay its
staff $70K a year. All of which is to say that they are unlikely to receive the
sorts of benefits that the “privileged” employee class gets. I have no idea
what kind of arrangement Gravity has in this respect – and it appears neither
does the NYT, which didn’t think that it worthwhile to asking mildly probing
questions about the scope of the wage increase policy.
(4) Hero worship is dangerous. One last
point -- which was to some extent intimated above – is that the article very
troublingly puts Price on a pedestal. Indeed, just like so many other articles
published on Gravity’s wage increase, everything revolves around the CEO. Why
is that? Readers might be inclined to think this is natural – after all, Price
is the visionary who dreamt up the policy, correct? Doesn’t that suggest that
he is the best person to interview? Well, think about it – that would depend on
the purpose of your article, wouldn’t it? If you wanted to write about how the
wage increase affected the lives of the company’s employees, who do you think
would be in the best position to discuss that?
What is really going on here is old-fashioned
hero worship. And why should this surprise? A lesson from propaganda and PR is
that ideas are swallowed up much more easily when they are associated with and
embodied by purportedly great individuals. Here, Price – the ubermensch-wunderkind
shown exercising in his personal gym in one sequence and commanding his employees
in the next, founded a successful company in his early twenties, and, now in
his early thirties, has revolutionized business by exercising a social
conscience within it. What ideas, then, is Price being used to convey here? Something
about considerateness and altruism (at least for your immediate employees), but
arguably the core message here is about entrepreneurialism. Indeed, though the
article speaks somewhat to the importance of caring for the well-being of
others, it is much more intensely focused on Price’s indomitable spirit, his
willingness to take risks over the objections of naysayers and move forward
with a bold plan that is, really, the wave of the future. What business is
supposed to be!
Price’s use as an exemplar is unsettling
because it naturalizes the very
inequality Price himself purportedly rejects. As stated earlier, Price is
portrayed as a man possessing special knowledge, keen abilities, and high intelligence.
Not unlike a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, he is the “genius” behind the
company’s success. And upon beholding such brilliance, people are made to
understand their place – beneath their betters, of course. (Never mind that “genius”
is almost always nothing more than a proxy for money or power – or social
capital accumulated by the expenditure of money or the exercise of power.) And
this is particularly troublesome because the purported visionaries in stories
like this one are almost universally rich white males. Thus an ancient
patriarchal power structure is renewed anew every time one reads articles like
this on, even if such renewal is contrary to the author’s and the subject’s express
intent. The effects can be mitigated, sure, but because this power structure has
some significant staying power, it cannot and should be casually ignored. Which
is not to say that articles about commendable acts such as Price’s should not
written. On the contrary, they certainly should be, albeit with a more
interesting cast of characters and some context to ground people in the actual
issues. Mythical heroes are not the answer.
