Bernie Sanders: Disney should use ‘Avengers’ profits to pay its workers a ‘middle class wage’

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.

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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Sky Palma

Before launching DeadState back in 2012, Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art.