This Monday, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) called out Disney in the wake of its record-breaking profits from the latest “Avengers” movie, saying that the company should use its vast wealth to pay its employees a little better.
In a post to Twitter, Sanders linked to a Bloomberg article that highlighted the opening weekend box office returns for the movie, which totaled around $1.2 billion worldwide.
“What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million — over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes,” Sanders wrote.
What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million – over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes. https://t.co/NrcFSk4LZc
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 29, 2019
As The Hill points out, Sanders has been a longtime critic of Disney. At a rally in June, he said there’s no defending a company “that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry.”
Sharing Sanders’ sentiment is the granddaughter of Walt Disney co-founder Roy Disney, Abigail Disney. In a series of tweets last month, she called on the company to give its employees a raise. During a subsequent conversation about “humane capitalism” hosted by Fast Company, she said Disney CEO Bob Iger‘s 2018 compensation of $65.6 million was “insane.”
“So there’s a point at which there’s just too much going around the top of the system into this class of people who — I’m sorry this is radical — have too much money,” she said, according to The Washington Post.
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