the.com/payroll
the silent machine turning your hours into someone else's mortgage payment, biweekly and merciless
means The total list of a company's employees and the wages they're owed, or the system that calculates and distributes that pay.
from A plain English compound, joined sometime in the 18th or 19th century from 'pay' and 'roll.' The 'roll' part is the literal one: rolls were once actual scrolls of parchment or paper on which names and accounts were written, the way a 'roll call' still summons names from a list. So 'payroll' began life as exactly what it sounds like — the rolled-up record of who gets paid. 'Pay' itself comes through Old French 'paier' from Latin 'pacare,' to pacify or appease, which carries a quietly cynical truth: paying someone was originally a way of making peace with them.
- ancient origin
- Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt rations
- word root
- 'salary' descends from the Latin word for salt
- first computer use
- early business computers were built largely for payroll
- biggest expense
- labor often consumes most of a company's budget
- tax engine
- payroll taxes fund a huge share of government revenue
walmart payroll — 2.3 million employees paid weekly across 10,500+ stores globally
us federal payroll — 2.9 million civilian employees paid by office of personnel management
amazon payroll — 1.5 million employees paid bi-weekly worldwide as of 2024