Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, is backing a $15-per-hour minimum wage.
“I think 15 [dollars an hour] is a great place to start for the whole country,” he said in an interview on Monday with CNN.
{mosads}“That’s one way to bring everybody up, and it gets back to your previous question about a race to the bottom. Are we just about more earnings per share, or do we have bigger goals?”
Benioff, who has contributed to the Ready for Hillary super-PAC, said income inequality is a problem that “matters a lot, not just in this country but the world.” And he took corporations to task for paying their workers low wages while bringing in significant revenue.
“But you can’t be giving all these folks, in these Fortune 25 companies, positions where they are in poverty,” he said. “That makes no sense to me.”
Other tech titans have waded into the minimum-wage debate as well.
Facebook announced last month that it was going to require contractors who did a “substantial amount of work” for the company and work for U.S.-based companies to be paid $15 an hour.
The issue of the minimum wage has gained attention, as Democrats make income inequality one of their central themes ahead of 2016.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to make it a centerpiece of her presidential campaign — and progressives have called for legislation to raise the federal minimum wage.