Hannah Williams works as an information analyst for a authorities contractor and earns $115,000 a 12 months.
Washington
Perspective | This Washington TikToker is getting people to reveal their salaries
She’s going to inform you how she give up to change into a junior knowledge analyst for a small authorities contracting agency, a job that gained her $55,000 a 12 months, a safety clearance and 40 undesirable kilos. She labored in a safe constructing and couldn’t go away throughout the day, so she spent her breaks grabbing espresso on the Dunkin’ within the constructing.
She’s going to inform you she left that place, and one other after that, and feared she had “wrecked her résumé” as a result of all that job hopping occurred in lower than three years.
“I assumed, ‘Nobody goes to rent me once more,’ ” she mentioned. However then she did analysis on pay ranges in her discipline and discovered the best way to spotlight her strengths, and when she met with a job recruiter, she felt assured speaking numbers. “When she requested me what my desired wage vary was, I flipped it on her and I requested, ‘What’s the funds for the position?’ ”
Whereas it’s spectacular that at 25, Williams has managed to develop her wage from $40,000 to nearly thrice that quantity, that’s not why I’m telling you about her. I’m telling you about her as a result of she is making an attempt to assist different folks discover success in an usually opaque job market.
Williams is a graduate of Northern Virginia Group School and Georgetown College. She has gained a TikTok following by publicly speaking about her experiences working in Washington. However just lately, she has taken that dialog additional. She has been persuading different folks within the D.C. area to speak brazenly about their jobs.
Previously week, Williams has posted movies on TikTok and Instagram underneath the identify Wage Clear Road. They present her standing within the Georgetown part of D.C. and in Arlington, Va., asking folks what they do and the way a lot they make.
The movies characteristic a nurse, a lifeguard, a rocket scientist, an architect and authorities staff — all revealing their pay. The movies present an editor who earns $60,000 a 12 months, a Navy contractor who makes $75,000 a 12 months and a gross sales engineer who brings in $145,000 a 12 months. Two academics in separate movies give their annual salaries as $83,000 and $100,000 — quantities that led many individuals who watched the movies to precise shock and others to quote the area’s excessive value of dwelling.
Up to now, Williams has posted six movies, and so they have drawn thousands and thousands of views. One video has greater than 14 million views.
“If the Nice Resignation has taught us something, it’s that there’s energy in numbers,” Williams mentioned. “When staff are empowered, they will really affect change. I figured, ‘What higher solution to get open salaries on the market on the Web than by asking strangers on the road?’ I assumed that it was going to achieve success, however I had no thought it might go as viral because it did.”
She had not anticipated that the interviews would immediate hundreds of strangers to click on and remark and ask for extra content material.
“I really like this collection,” one commenter wrote. “I’m gonna gown up and stroll across the streets of DC hoping y’all discover me.”
“As somebody seeking to make an enormous profession change, please don’t cease these movies!” wrote one other.
“Phenomenal collection. Come over to Philly,” somebody wrote.
Commenters have urged her to go to Houston, Chicago and New York. Williams mentioned she plans finally to go to different cities and ask folks in these locations about their salaries.
That nationwide tour will little doubt achieve Williams extra views, however it additionally will give her viewers a fuller view of pay throughout the nation and of their communities. Speaking about earnings stays a taboo subject, and a few firms attempt to forestall workers from revealing their salaries to co-workers. Efforts that push towards that agreed-upon silence increase necessary questions: Who advantages most from the shortage of transparency about pay, and who’s damage most by it?
“Not having these salaries and people open clear conversations can be a drawback for ladies and other people of colour as a result of they’re those which might be extra more likely to be taken benefit of,” Williams mentioned. “So, having these conversations is de facto necessary for closing the pay hole and rising variety in firms.”
A couple of years in the past, I wrote a column about D.C. having the nation’s widest wage hole for Black girls. In it, I advised you a couple of Black lady in her 70s who labored within the service business and had no financial savings or retirement plan.
“I’ll most likely must work till I die, and that’s simply the reality,” she mentioned.
The primary day Williams held a microphone in entrance of strangers and requested about their wages, she was full of nerves. She had created a emblem and printed T-shirts so that individuals may see she had a objective for her questions. Even so, she wasn’t certain how folks may reply.
Up to now, she mentioned, she hasn’t encountered anybody who has change into offended or threatening. If folks don’t wish to reveal their pay, she doesn’t push them. But when they’re hesitant, she spends time explaining to them why these conversations matter.
Williams recalled an fascinating dialog she had with a lady in Arlington a number of days in the past. The lady acknowledged Williams from TikTok however mentioned she couldn’t persuade herself to disclose her wage. “I’ll work by this in remedy,” the girl joked.
“We’re not making an attempt to vary folks’s minds in a single day,” Williams mentioned. “However even those who don’t wish to say it, they go away with one thing to consider. … So many people equate our salaries and pay with our price. We have to disconnect from that notion. It’s actually only a quantity, and it’s extremely seemingly that you simply’re underpaid.”
Among the salaries that individuals have shared within the movies have left commenters lamenting their very own wages, discussing the necessity for profession adjustments and asking Williams to go to less-wealthy elements of the D.C. area.
Williams mentioned she desires to “hit each space of town,” however that may take time. She spends her days in spite of everything in the identical approach because the folks she interviews — working.
Just before the three-day Bitcoin 2024 conference got underway in Nashville this week, Tyler Winklevoss, the bitcoin billionaire who founded the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini with his twin brother Cameron, had harsh words for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. He was incensed that after years of tension between the Biden administration and the crypto industry — many in the space have complained of a regulatory crackdown — the vice president had declined an invitation to the annual bitcoin extravaganza.
“She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences,” Winklevoss tweeted on Wednesday. He added, ominously: “Our industry won’t forget this. We will show no mercy in November.” Earlier that day, Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey, the organizer of the event, claimed in a tweet that a Democratic donor had told him Harris privately says that “Bitcoin is money for criminals.” (While the sum of money collected annually through crypto-based crime is in the billions, this represents a relatively small percentage of transactions.) Meanwhile, feverish rumors that an increasingly crypto-friendly Donald Trump might use his keynote speech at the conference to announce plans for adopting Bitcoin as a U.S. strategic reserve asset caused the price to surge. It had also soared after he survived an assassination attempt earlier this month, temporarily boosting confidence in his election bid.
But Harris had every reason to feel unwelcome at a bitcoin convention. Chief among them is that tech oligarchs and the crypto crowd have already thrown their lot in with Trump as they seek a freer hand in the economy of digital assets. Trump, meanwhile, has aggressively courted the movers and shakers of crypto finance, trying to sell himself as “the crypto president” who can reverse Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the sector — this despite commenting himself in 2021 that bitcoin “seems like a scam.” In Saturday’s speech, Trump said that if he wins, “the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world,” adding: “If crypto is going to define the future, I want to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say … I want America to be the nation that leads the way, and that’s what’s going to happen. So you’re going to be very happy with me.”
Trump outlined several steps he would take to aid the crypto industry. “The day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ anti-crypto crusade will be over,” he said. Trump pledged, to great applause, that he would immediately fire Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, and replace him with an industry-friendly regulator. He said he would create a presidential crypto advisory council to create a new regulatory framework that would “benefit” the industry. And he warned the audience that if Democrats win in November, “every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious. They will be ruthless. They will do things that you wouldn’t believe.”
The remarks should fuel even more donations from crypto bulls already betting on Trump. Bitcoin Magazine‘s Bailey, for his part, committed to a goal of raising $15 million for Trump’s campaign during the Nashville event. Last month, the Winklevoss brothers — whose Gemini this year settled a lawsuit from the state of New York over a frozen crypto lending program, returning $2.2 billion to customers and paying a $37 million fine — pledged $1 million in bitcoin each to Trump’s campaign. The amounts exceeded the $844,600 maximum that the Trump 47 Committee, the joint fundraising group to which they donated, can legally accept from an individual, and the Winklevosses had the difference refunded. (Among other spending on GOP campaigns, the committee funnels money toward covering Trump’s legal bills.) They also each chipped in $250,000 for America PAC, the super PAC through which Elon Musk and allies are backing Trump.
Other America PAC donors include Shaun Maguire of VC firm Sequoia Capital, who has expressed interest in “legitimizing” crypto and announced a $300,000 Trump donation with a statement that argued “Democrats have been trying to regulate technology — especially open source AI and crypto in ways that incentivize the best builders to build outside of America.” He has poured half a million dollars into the super PAC. Ken Howery, a co-founder along with Peter Thiel of VC firm Founders Fund, which is heavily invested in crypto and blockchain technologies, has given $1 million. Another million came from Antonio Gracias, the former director of Tesla thought to have helped engineer the automaker’s purchase of $1.5 billion in bitcoin in 2021. His firm, Valor Equity Partners, invests millions in crypto businesses. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the software company Palantir and managing partner of the firm 8VC, gave $1 million to America PAC as well. Earlier this year, he mused on how artificial intelligence and crypto technologies could benefit one another.
And while he hasn’t donated to the PAC, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and close Musk associate David Sacks has given thousands directly to the Trump campaign. Two months ago, Sacks said he preferred Trump’s sudden crypto cheerleading to the Biden administration’s scrutiny. “It might have been pandering,” Sacks said at a business summit in May. “But at least he’s saying the right thing and Biden is not saying the right thing. At least if he’s pandering, there’s a higher chance that maybe he’ll do the right thing.” (Last year, on the tech and investment podcast All-In, Sacks floated the unsubstantiated claim that SEC chair Gensler, along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, had forged an “alliance,” with Warren promising “she will make him Treasury Secretary if he basically destroys crypto in the U.S.”)
It’s not just about Trump, either. The super PAC Fairshake, bankrolled by crypto firms including Coinbase, Jump Crypto and Ripple, has become a major force in the financing of congressional races, backing candidates deemed allies of the industry and helping to unseat opponents including progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Katie Porter with critical ads. It has received tens of millions from the Winklevosses and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invests in crypto companies. (Andreessen and Horowitz recently pledged to donate to Trump; Horowitz says the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”) As of the end of June, Fairshake had close to $120 million in cash on hand, while two other crypto super PACs, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, have more than $5 million and nearly $2 million, respectively. The former has spent on media attacking Democrats pushing for consumer protections in crypto; the latter has doled out more than $15 million on endorsements for Republicans in the 2024 election cycle.
But while Trump had planned to ride this wave of cash by going after Biden for his record on cryptocurrency, it may be hard to use the same line against Harris, seen by some as potentially amenable to these businesses due to her background in tech-saturated San Francisco politics. And if a few major investors were stung to be snubbed by Harris this weekend, it’s still unclear what position she’ll take on the issue. On Friday, the Financial Times reported that Harris advisers have reached out to people close to crypto firms to try to “reset” relations with the industry.
Even before Biden exited the race, the administration had made efforts to alleviate the bad blood between the White House and crypto evangelists, and the House passed a pro-crypto bill in May with support from 71 Democrats. Although Biden was not in favor of it, he did not say he would veto the legislation.
All the same, it would be ridiculous for crypto’s elite to try to disentangle their fortunes from Trump’s at this point, regardless of the direction Harris takes. They’ve made their pick and infused his campaign with considerable wealth, hoping for a president who takes a hands-off approach to their tokens and trading platforms. Now they just have to hope it’s enough to send Trump’s stock to the moon.
“He literally asked me, ‘You want to come with me?’ I was like, ‘Nah, I’m just gonna stick back here and throw the football around.’ And I just remember seeing him walk out — as a kid, everything seemed bigger — but maybe like 40, 50 yards deep into the water. And then he — I saw his hands waving at me, and he just dipped underwater.”
People rushed out to help, but when they got there, they couldn’t find his father. He had been dragged under by a rip tide.
“Forty-five minutes later, he floated back,” Lucas said.
“At the age of seven, I was out of having a dad, out of having my best bud, my best friend, my greatest — my best teacher, you know what I’m saying? Like, the guy that was put in this world to give me all the game that I’ve been searching for since then.”
Twenty-six years later, Lucas is a man, 6-foot-8, 327 pounds, a professional hitter with a goofball grin and the self-confidence he lacked growing up without his dad. Lucas believes his unlikely journey has led him to this moment with the Washington Commanders, where, entering the 11th season of his improbable NFL career, the longtime backup is competing for the huge role of starting left tackle and blindside protector for new franchise quarterback Jayden Daniels.
Lucas, 33, feels he’s doing well early in the competition with rookie Brandon Coleman, and unlike his first shot at being a full-time starter (his second season, with Detroit), he feels ready.
Many players who go undrafted out of college, as Lucas did out of Kansas State in 2014, get chewed up by the NFL. Their moment is darkened by the ever-present possibility of getting fired, and they’re often forced out of the league against their will, broken or brokenhearted. In his fifth year, Lucas was overwhelmed by repeated rejection and tried to quit by ignoring calls from his agent.
It was in those difficult moments Lucas felt his father’s absence most.
“Outside of my coaches and my teammates to push me and tell me I could do this, I haven’t had someone I could call on and just tell them how I’m feeling, what’s going on,” he said.
“It’s really been a me situation. Like, me figuring it out. Me going home and sitting in silence for two hours because I got beat in practice, and I’m thinking about why I got beat and how I can’t get beat no more because I’m on the edge of getting cut, and you know — I’m saying it’s been stressful. ”
As he honed his skills, Lucas has grown mentally tough, observing people around him, looking for “life tidbits” and refining who he wants to be.
In 2018, everything came together. Lucas caught a break, played well in one game for his hometown New Orleans Saints and parlayed it into a job with Chicago, where he shined. In 2020, he signed a two-year deal with the Commanders, and in 2022, he signed another. Last summer, he felt like he finally “filled myself up enough to pour into others.”
And he had an idea how: Swim camp. Every summer, NFL players host youth football camps across the country, and while he saw the value in them, he wanted to do something more personal. He attended pool parties growing up, even after his father’s death, but he still had never gone in a pool deeper than his height.
So he partnered with Son of a Saint, a nonprofit organization for fatherless boys in New Orleans, and figured he could show boys like him how to be a man and teach them a potentially lifesaving skill.
“I live in New Orleans, Louisiana,” Lucas said. “We are currently seven feet under sea level. In New Orleans, we get flooding. Hurricane Katrina, it was flooding for 45 days.”
This year, at his second camp, the only boy scared of the water was too big for anyone but Lucas to hold while learning to doggy paddle. Lucas encouraged him to go into the pool, urging him to fight their fear together.
“Trust me,” Lucas said. “I won’t let you drown.”
Weeks later, Lucas left New Orleans for training camp extra motivated. His girlfriend — with whom he bonded, in part, over missing a parent — is pregnant with their first child, a son, due in early November. Sometimes, when Lucas notices her belly growing, it makes him want to go outside in the sun and practice.
“When he gets here, I just want him to see his daddy doing the right thing.”
Lucas wants to teach his son all the lessons he had to gather from others, such as how to mow the lawn or drive on the highway. He’s picking up even more from Instagram and TikTok. He hopes to one day teach his son to play tackle.
And he wants to throw his son in the water. He wants him to flail on his own at first, to fight to float, because he believes struggling will help his son get comfortable. Even if he doesn’t like to swim, Lucas’s top priority is for his son to never feel how he sometimes felt around water.
“He’s not gonna have a fear of it,” he said.
We have been working like mad on fixing the house up to get it ready for our wedding. Neither of us is very experienced with DIY, so it’s been a difficult, stressful process and caused some tension between us. We were discussing what kind of flooring to get for the front hall, and I wanted the more expensive but easier-to-work-with stuff. We got into a fight that escalated to the point of him accusing me of being a gold digger who was after his money. I was in shock and asked him why he would think that, and he said, “Because you told me about how you grew up poor,” and he’s had the thought in the back of his head since we bought the house. He told me he has a spreadsheet where he keeps track of how much he’s spent on me versus how much I’ve spent on him and he has spent thousands more on me, not even counting the money his parents gave us.
I told him that didn’t sound right since we split all costs 50/50, and he admitted it included my engagement ring. It is a family heirloom his great-aunt gave him, but he was counting the value of it.
Later he apologized, but I’m still hurt and angry. I feel paranoid that maybe his family said something. I’m really sad that all this time I’ve been loving him and thinking he was wonderful, and he’s been thinking this way about me and even documenting it so he could throw it in my face.
He’s said the spreadsheet is just an “anxiety thing” and he loves me and wants us to work on fixing things. I think I do, too, but then I think of what he said and I get overwhelmed. How can I get over this?
“Gold Digger”: Whoo. I don’t know. I don’t know that I could.
He not only has kept the thought in the back of his mind for months? years? that you have poor values and ulterior motives and can’t be trusted, but kept records in the event he needs to prove it.
I wish I had a more hopeful answer for you. But he either lashed out impulsively and didn’t mean it, or accidentally told the truth — those are the only two choices — and the first is a stretch when there’s a spreadsheet as evidence of the second.
Plus, the first is so vicious in its own right.
He says he loves you, okay. But trusts? Respects? Believes in?
Does he feel lucky every day to be the person you chose?
Best case, “just an ‘anxiety thing,’” still casts you as a threat to be controlled. So the “work on fixing things” doesn’t sound like DIY, but instead couples counseling at the least.
The family paranoia, by the way, is wasted stress — each of you stands on your own authority in choosing your partner, 100 percent, or you’re not ready to be anyone’s partner. If he’s that susceptible to their influence, then the problem is still between the two of you, so that’s where your attention belongs.
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