Some of my favorites from the first article:

“Gravity’s 2014 profit was $2.2 million, Price adds. At private companies with sales like Gravity’s total revenue, salary and bonus for the top quartile of CEOs is $710,000, according to Chief Executive magazine’s annual compensation survey. At companies with sales like Gravity’s net revenue, the top quartile pay falls to about $373,000. At companies with a similar number of employees as Gravity, the top quartile of CEOs makes $470,000 in salary and bonus. The CEO of JetPay, a publicly traded competitor that processes a similar volume as Gravity, received $355,000 in 2014.“

Yet his comp was $1.1MM?

“Price signed with the talent agency William Morris Endeavor Entertainment and now charges as much as $20,000 per speech, Pirkle says.”

Or his obvious avoidance to answering the direct questions. It’s cool what he did, but I don’t trust the guy. Or at least I doubt his motives are so honorable. Perhaps I’m too cynical.

If you’ve gone from earning 40k and struggling, to earning 70k, do you care what the CEO’s motives are?

It’s been 5 years, or $150k each, and there’s been no apparent bad news. What more do you need?

Have you changed in the last 5 years?

The bad news is from his brother/shareholder who claims he was deprived of his share of profit by CEO diverting funds to his own wage, and from his ex wife who approves extensive physical abuse.

Even if he dropped his salary to $70k, he makes money elsewhere (like speaking fees, apparently), and has a huge equity stake in the company that has grown enormously.

Btw, I think Google could already either pay 70k+ to every employee or is pretty close. They just need to make sure that all the janitors and baristas are employed by subcontractors.

what would a barista or janitor get paid at Google today? I always thought that they did use subcontractors for these roles? I must misunderstand, are you implying that employment via a subcontractor would increase their salary?

> I must misunderstand, are you implying that employment via a subcontractor would increase their salary?

Subcontracted workers are technically not employees of Google, therefore can be disregarded when making claims about the min salary of employees.

They are using subcontractors for at least some of these positions. But I don't know whether for all, hence my suggestion to ensure they outsource all the lowly paid position, if they wanted to hit this arbitrary metric.

It's all a bit tongue in cheek and silly.

It does have some real world consequences because of some regulation that requires companies to publish some information about the ratio between CEO pay to lowest paid employee.

But as we noted here, who is officially an employee and who ain't is flexible.

Uber and eBay and Amazon are an even more extreme example: Uber drivers and eBay sellers are at the heart of what makes those companies tick. But they are not employees.

He's saying that if Google wanted another way to present themselves as a progressive company, they could fire everyone who works for them doing a marginal job and replace them with contractors. This would allow them to set a higher minimum salary and pretend that they are very generous. In reality, they would have fired a lot of people and the contractors would be worse off than they were as employees and this would all have been a cynical ploy to appear good while really being evil. In other words, OP is being cynical about whether this company policy is really as progressive as it's made out to be, or might represent a dirtier trend.

I understand that if the low salary workers are employed via a subcontractor, that workers salary is irrelevant for the average salary you are paying.