A Seattle CEO is making headlines for his decision to cut his own pay and raise his employees’ minimum salary to $70,000 a year. Dan Price, the chief executive of Gravity Payments, said he made the decision after reading a study that revealed giving people more money makes them happy.
At least one influential liberal blogger was very excited about the news.
2. This speaks to a real driver of inequality: there used to be a culture where CEOs demanded less money
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) April 15, 2015
4. Culture drives policy, and policy drives culture. — Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) April 15, 2015
Ezra Klein is right. Culture does drive policy. That's why Hillary Clinton, as CEO of her 2016 presidential campaign, should follow Price's lead and champion a $70,000 minimum salary for campaign employees. She can certainly relate to modern day CEOs who refuse to demand less money, given that she routinely accepted huge speaking fees from public universities, even after students protested. Maybe this is a way to help soften her reputation as a greedhead.
Clinton is already under fire for paying women less than men while serving as a Senator. The Clinton campaign disputes this, obviously, and recently pushed back with its own set of data that was leaked to BuzzFeed (though not made available for public scrunity).
Still, that data suggests that Hillary does not love her low-level staffers as much as Price does. The median annual salary for Clinton employees during her tenure in the Senate was just $43,000. She can, and must, do better.
Income inequality is a big problem within the Democratic Party:
According to an analysis by the Times Data Desk, part of the Los Angeles Times, the Obama campaign had 901 people on its payroll last month, and paid them a median salary of $3,074 a month, or $36,886 a year.
The Romney campaign, in contrast, had 403 people on its payroll, and paid them a median salary of $6,437 in August, which would mean $77,250 a year.
Hillary could easily afford to be more generous. She pocketed $70K every 15-20 minutes on the speaking circuit, and her campaign expects to raise upwards of $2.5 billion. Paying a living wage is the least she could do to show her commitment to the everyday Oberlin graduates who are lining up to work on her campaign.
After all, which is a better way to spend all that campaign money? On efforts to elect Hillary Clinton? Or on something that would actually make people happy?