Ran across this idea a little while back and wanted to get a broader perspective on the idea.
I know a lot of people claim that if you can’t pay your employees a living wage, while turning a profit, that you shouldn’t be running a business at all. And while I do understand and (mostly) agree, I also think it’s a bit of an over simplification.
So the basic idea (as I understand it). Is that even if a company wants to pay you what you are worth, they often can’t without vastly increasing the cost of their services. If they raise the cost of their services a large percentage of their customers will choose to shop else where. So the company is left in the unfortunate choice to either underpay their staff or go belly up while “trying to do the right thing”. Before you point to the boss taking a pay cut, do ask yourself how much should the boss be making (after costs)? Or maybe better said, at what point are you not making enough to justify running your business?
To put it into a little bit easier context. How many of you are willing to pay $40 for a pizza (from a place that pays its employees a living wage), when you can get basically the same thing for $25 a block or two further away (at a place that doesn’t pay their employees a living wage)?