Pictured Above And Center: Minimum-wage increase opponent and NFIB/NY State Director Mike Durant at a January 10th presser with Senator Tom Libous and some enthralled business and landowner coalition leaders. Durant was speaking on behalf of their coalition, “Clean Growth Now.” A master of political optics, Durant is wearing a lemongrass “green, sustainable” tie as he urges New York state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to hurry the fuck up with its proposed regulations for natural gas development. Many studies have shown that cheap, local natural gas benefits New York's littlest businesses most of all. Or, perhaps the tie color is meant to evoke the lime-yellow hue of light natural gas. Anyway, the man is a tie-selecting genius. (Image Credit: NFIB itself; Touch Up Credit: Me)

 

Things were looking pretty good for a moment there, if you were a fan of livable wages for New York’s hardscrabble and adorable working families. The executive vice president of the state’s Retail Council, Ted Potrikus, revealed that his group would be willing to compromise on a bill that would increase the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 beginning in 2013. After meeting with two of the bill’s sponsors—Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Four Loko party-pooper Jeff Klein—Potrikus said his group was open to the idea, if the increase occurred gradually over three years and wasn’t tied to inflation. In other words, the same deal that got pushed through in 2004. But now, the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business is feeling all betrayed—and calling out their Retail Council peeps for supporting this “killer” of the “the Main Street businesses.”

 

So: How much do senior employees of the NFIB make?

 

The first thing you’re going to notice if you look at the NFIB’s 2010 tax return [PDF] is that anybody who works for them full-time in some managerial capacity is making well over six figures. Every VP whose salary they reported in 2010 made over $200k annually.

 

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The next thing you might notice is that they very generously contracted out over $3 million dollars in advertising work to deli meat Darth Vader Karl Rove and his American Crossroads sister firm Crossroads Media LLC.

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So, now you can add this to your data pool for tabulating the average cost of a human soul in today’s marketplace.

 

Alternately, you might be thinking, “I’m a senior VP in marketing already! I could do Mark Garzone’s job for less than $303,538 a year.” If you’d like to apply for any of these positions at NFIB—and are willing to work for half or a quarter of these salaries—please send your resume and cover letter to max.pv@newyorkjournal.org and I will personally forward it along!

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