Last week, Dan Price—CEO of a credit card payments company called Gravity Payments—decided to raise the minimum wage for all his employees to $70,000, and, in the process, lowered his own $1 million salary to that same level. The bold move was met with praise from some and criticism from others who charge that Price is waging a futile battle with the gods of market economics.
To those critics, Harvard historian Nancy Koehn has a firm rebuttal: "I think those folks didn't get the memo about the 21st century," she said.
"It's a great example of business...stepping up to a bigger plate that includes some sort of social import or impact in the new world of leadership and business success," she said.
Koehn says moves like his are an important step in chipping away at the extremely high rates of income inequality in the United States, where the ratio between the salaries of Fortune 500 company' CEOs and their employees is a staggering 500:1.
"At some level, we got lost collectively and think that the leader of a public corporation is somehow larger than life, cut from the rib of Zeus and going to deliver us to Promised Land and the new Jersualem and deserve, somehow, $100 million dollars," Koehn said.
"I don't know how you can make that case," she said.
To hear more from Nancy Koehn, tune in to the audio link above.
