Dan Price – Say it ain’t so

This champion for a living wage for workers has a serious flaw: there are allegations of abuse and rape. I want to repeat and emphasize that at this time, they are only allegations, but they are pretty serious.

He became famous for giving up his million-dollar salary to increase his employees’ salaries to a minimum of $70K a year, the level that science had determined would lead to happy employees (I think). A lot of people got angry at him, including his brother and his CFO, but eventually, his company ended up growing and becoming more successful.

On Twitter and on LinkedIn, he would dish out some pithy facts that would highlight the glaring inequity of pay for CEOs and pay for regular employees. To me, they were pretty damning and once or twice, I would note his posts here. I imagine he was a hero to a lot of people.

Then, last week, I read in the New York Times that sexual abuse and rape was leveled at him by multiple women. With one woman I would have thought it could be true or it could be some female trying to get something from him and thus we all can’t jump to conclusions. We would have to wait for the investigations and the trial before we could determine the veracity of the charges.

But multiple women? That gets harder for me. It’s a little harder for multiple women to decide to try to get something out of him at the same time. That’s not to say we can jump to conclusions but it sure is a lot harder to imagine that all of the accusations are false.

So, yes, I will have to wait until the outcome of the trial but is sure is a sad day. Doing good for the workers does not wipe out the bad accruing from rape and abuse…it just doesn’t.