CEO: “We don’t need low wages to make money”
Check out this from CNN Money:
Bank to pay everyone at least a ‘living wage’
On Wednesday, 17% of First Green’s 66 employees will be getting a raise under the company’s new “living wage” program.
Under that policy, no one will be paid less than $30,000 a year, or the hourly equivalent for part-time workers. That means the base pay at the bank will be roughly $14.40 an hour, or nearly double the Florida state minimum wage of $7.93.
“We don’t believe in low wages. We don’t need them to make money,” Kenneth LaRoe, the bank’s founder and CEO, told CNNMoney.
The full article is here. H/T to Mark Shea, who helpfully reminds us of Catholic teaching (as presented in Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum) on the matter:
45. Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.
Mark might also have cited Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magister:
71. We therefore consider it Our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner.
Or Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens:
19. Just remuneration for the work of an adult who is responsible for a family means remuneration which will suffice for establishing and properly maintaining a family and for providing security for its future. Such remuneration can be given either through what is called a family wage-that is, a single salary given to the head of the family fot his work, sufficient for the needs of the family without the other spouse having to take up gainful employment outside the home.
Or several other sources of authoritative Catholic teaching for that matter, but you get the point.
Next time you’re tempted to think that there is nothing good about our secular, supposedly amoral society, keep in mind places like First Green Bank in Florida, a secular business run by people of who-knows-what-if-any religious convictions, upholding Catholic values and doctrine in an admirably counter-cultural way.
