(Jesus says the kingdom of God is like a landowner who hires groups of people at different times of the day to work his farm. Some work all day, some half a day, some just an hour in the early evening. At the end of the day they line up to get their pay, and they each one finds that they get exactly what ... everyone else gets! They all get the same! "Not fair!" some of the all-day workers say. To which the land-owner says, "But haven't I done what is right? I have a feeling you are just jealous of my generosity.")
If Jesus of the Gospels were here today telling a story about the kingdom of God on Earth, I wonder if he might have told this one:
In
2004 a man named Dan Price, along with his brother Lucas built a company called
Gravity Payments. It was a financial
service and credit-card processing company in Seattle, and it did well for the
first few years. Then in 2008 when the
recession hit, Gravity suffered as many of its client companies either folded
or suffered declines in their business.
Dan managed to rebuild, though, and within a few years Gravity was doing
very well again in the post-recession economy.
In
April 2011 Dan noticed, however, that one of his entry-level employees, a phone
technician named Jason Hill, was fairly consistently in a sour mood. One day he saw Jason on a smoke break and
invited him for a walk in the woods. On
that walk Dan found out how difficult life was for Jason on his entry-level
$35,000 salary. And how angry Jason was
at how Dan’s top-down policies of tight fiscal management made lower-level
employees like him bear the cost of the company’s profitability.
Dan
had always prided himself on treating his employees respectfully and well, and
for giving them the tools to succeed in life.
He explored Jason’s frustrations, and found Jason was not alone in his
struggles – especially having to live in Seattle and that whole area of
Washington state. He also realized that
the more financially anxious and stressed his employees were, the less
productive and creative they were in their work and the less committed to the
company’s over-all well-being.
So in
late 2011 Dan instituted a policy of 20% annual raises for every employee
making less than $100,000. This
continued for 3 years, and Dan monitored the results. Even this, he saw, was not enough to really
give the lowest-level employees what they needed to be secure and able to work at
the company with joy rather than constant financial anxiety.
So in April
2015 Dan made the decision to raise the entry-level salary of every employee to
$70,000 – which his research told him was the level at which people in that
part of the country were able to report freedom from financial stress and an
ability to just enjoy doing well at their job.
And to help finance the change he cut his own salary from $1,000,000 to
$70,000.
That’s
when the news hit the fan, as they say.
Dan’s
restructuring of Gravity’s pay schedule was front-page news across the country
and in neighbouring countries for a few weeks.
The change was lauded by some – by the employees, by anti-poverty
advocated, by social justice types. It
was questioned and criticized by others – especially by conservative and
right-wing political leaders who called the move socialist and communistic. It was laughed at, and scorned by other
business leaders who said the decision was impractical and would surely lead to
Gravity to fail in very short measure.
But
Dan Price stayed the course, even through the agony of a lawsuit brought
against him by his brother charging Dan with impropriety in the way he was
leading the company – a lawsuit in which Dan was vindicated by the courts and
was awared all costs incurred as well.
And now, two years later, Gravity Payments is still doing well – very well,
in fact – better than ever before.
What
Dan Price did raises a lot of questions – as many as he sought to answer. Maybe what he did creates as many problems as
it seeks to solve. It raises as much
criticism and as many objections as it draws gratitude and praise.
And
maybe it all depends on where you sit.
And where any of us are in the story, and in situations like this.
I
doubt that Dan Price’s decision and the way he is running his company are a
template that can be easily and simplistically applied to all situations. Just like any parable of Jesus is not a
simple, moral directive to be applied literally or simplistically to just any
situation.
But
the story reminds us that when the kingdom of God rears its beautiful head in
the course of human affairs, it usually somehow overturns the way things
usually work and the ways we normally behave.
At the
very least, the story of Gravity Payments just like Jesus’s story of the
generous land-owner who does “what is right,” raises questions about how people
are treated in our society, and both how and even whether people –especially
those who are at risk, are valued and cared for by the way we structure our
organizations, and businesses, and communities.
Just how is people’s worth counted and calculated? How is their dignity and equality remembered
and upheld in our institutions – in our businesses, our companies, our
communities, our families, our churches?
The up-to-date
story of Dan Price, like the ancient and time-tested story of the generous
landowner make us think about things.
They surprise us with the way things might be, and can be.
And
then the question is: what do we do about it?
Once we know God’s way of doing things, what do we try to do? Once we know what God counts as important, what
do we count as worthwhile fighting for or working for?
God
gives us stories to chew on like manna from heaven – a different kind of bread
than we get from the world and its systems.
And we are what we eat, they say.
We become what we feed on.
And as
Moses said to the people of Israel when it became clear that the bread from
Egypt, which was all they’d ever known, would never get them to the Promised
Land, and that God was wanting to give them something new to chew on, “Try it,
you’ll like it. How can you know you won’t
like, if you’ve never tried it?”
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