That is pretty insightful. This must not be the top paid CEO in the land if that is the extent of his intellect (per the article).
Next, how much are those to get raises making right now? $65K, $40K, $20K? Apparently the CEO is taking a $930,000 pay cut (on the surface). That is noble and he will likely win some loyalty and productivity in the ranks. Good for him. But I hope he has given more thought and has more reason than just the PR side of their business. What about the 20 year employee that is making $72K/year currently? Does he get a separate but equal pay raise.
“What about the 20 year employee that is making $72K/year currently? Does he get a separate but equal pay raise.”
As my teen daughters argue in class at high school - “EQUAL isn’t the same thing as FAIR!”
That's always the Catch-22.
When the minimum wage is raised, unless you apply that raise proportionately throughout the workforce, you will have morale problems.
I can still remember when I was a minimum wage worker back in 1978. At that time, the minimum wage was $2.65/hr. I felt pretty good about my raise six months later to $2.75/hr but when my salary was adjusted to the new $2.90/hr minimum wage enacted in 1979, I felt a little cheated. For despite my hard work and full year of experience, I was now making no more than the entry level kid next to me.
So...
Let's say that the minimum wage is raised from $7.50 to $10.00 an hour, that is more or less what pending legislation intends to do at the federal level. That's a 25% increase.
Now it would not be enough to raise everybody else's wage by $2.50/hr as that would be disproportionate. Instead, you would need to raise everybody 25%. So that person making $70,000 would need to get brought up to $93,750. That's not a small amount of change in a business. This will definitely result in higher prices passed on to the consumer in whatever goods and services the company offers to the marketplace.
Which brings us full circle to those at the minimum wage...any perceived gain in lifestyle with their artificially inflated salaries will be offset by the higher prices they now have to pay for goods and services. So they will still be struggling at the bottom of the economic food chain.
Like Steve Jobs, he likely either has or receives stock & options, not really paying anything on receipt of them but paying taxes when cashing them in as needed. Seems Jobs lived a relatively humble existence, insanely wealthy but (for example) building a fairly small house and washing his own dishes by hand - so other than cashing in occasional stocks, his living expenses were pretty low. If “this company’s CEO” owns his house outright and has otherwise bought and/or paid for most of what he needs for the next few years, dropping his salary by a million bucks (but maybe re-routing it to stock options) means he doesn’t pay much in taxes at all because he doesn’t need much to live on.