La Colombe founder: If you can't pay employees a living wage, you don't deserve to be in business | Perspective
I am living, breathing, profitable proof that raising the minimum wage is good for business and workers.
Our workforce, profitable companies, and consumers as a whole need a minimum-wage raise. If even profitable, growing concerns like a coffee-roasting company can do it, so can others. I’ll go even further and say that unless you pay your employees a nonpredatory living wage that keeps people and their families above the poverty line, you don’t deserve to be in business. And you certainly don’t deserve a tax break for creating predatory-pay “jobs.”
Companies paying $7.25 an hour are cutting corners on human input. They are cheating the consumer by providing inferior services and products, and leaving their businesses weaker, if not anemic and dangerously exposed to competition. Corporations that provide the best services and products are the ones that succeed. The ones that race to the bottom will ultimately lose the race because there will always be someone willing to do it cheaper, or more sloppily, or with fewer quality controls.
Successful businesses evolve. They continually ask themselves what adjustments can be made to reach specific goals. Rather than laying the burden of the business on the shoulder of predatory pay, they make model adjustments, and continue to put the employee at the center of the company. In exchange, they earn employee loyalty and a happier company, which creates a better customer experience, better products, better culture, and brand. And, ultimately, a healthier, more profitable and faster-growing company. These sorts of companies flourish, directly contradicting the notion that fair pay is bad for business and bad for America.
I am living, breathing, profitable proof that raising the minimum wage is good for business and workers.
Our workforce, profitable companies, and consumers as a whole need a minimum-wage raise. If even profitable, growing concerns like a coffee-roasting company can do it, so can others. I’ll go even further and say that unless you pay your employees a nonpredatory living wage that keeps people and their families above the poverty line, you don’t deserve to be in business. And you certainly don’t deserve a tax break for creating predatory-pay “jobs.”
Companies paying $7.25 an hour are cutting corners on human input. They are cheating the consumer by providing inferior services and products, and leaving their businesses weaker, if not anemic and dangerously exposed to competition. Corporations that provide the best services and products are the ones that succeed. The ones that race to the bottom will ultimately lose the race because there will always be someone willing to do it cheaper, or more sloppily, or with fewer quality controls.
Successful businesses evolve. They continually ask themselves what adjustments can be made to reach specific goals. Rather than laying the burden of the business on the shoulder of predatory pay, they make model adjustments, and continue to put the employee at the center of the company. In exchange, they earn employee loyalty and a happier company, which creates a better customer experience, better products, better culture, and brand. And, ultimately, a healthier, more profitable and faster-growing company. These sorts of companies flourish, directly contradicting the notion that fair pay is bad for business and bad for America.
