Tom Ritchford
1 min readDec 7, 2021

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I note that you re-edited your comment to be more polite, and I really thank you for that. I should myself have been more polite.

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Well, in computer programming (my field) you can't get away with not paying people well but the economics are very different, so it isn't really applicable.

My business gives everyone a comfortable wage, and we're planning an apprentice program for early 2022 where we pay young people with no formal accreditation or experience in the field a living wage and intensively teach them "how it works", with the expectation that this would lead to a full-time job.

My company, Engora, is in the United States, but our management team (I'm the CTO) is very progressive. I should add that I took a significant pay cut (over 50%) to work there, though I expect to make that back and more.

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In a healthy society, all full-time jobs pay enough for a person to live on. If a job is worth doing, it is worth compensating the person doing it enough so they can survive and be comfortable.

I now live in the Netherlands, and people here get wages they can live on, even in fast food joints, and yet these business thrive and flourish.

(A living wage is also lower here because some things are much cheaper. The annual cost of my health insurance here is almost exactly the same as the monthly cost of my health insurance when I lived in the US.)

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