Bernie Sanders wants Walt Disney Co. to reallocate box office profits from Avengers: Endgame to pay all its employees “a middle-class wage.”
Sanders shared his viewpoint on Twitter, writing, “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,” and linked to a Bloomberg News story about Disney’s stock soaring after Endgame’s opening this weekend.
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) 29 April 2019
Endgame’s opening weekend became a historical moment when the film smashed box office records by earning an astounding $350 million in North America and $1.2 billion worldwide.
Even Roy Disney’s granddaughter Abigail shared earlier this month that she believes Iger’s salary “is insane” and appealed the company to move “some of its profits” to lower-ranking employees. “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, per The Hollywood Reporter.
In March, Disney revealed that it modified Iger’s total possible yearly salary by as much as $13.5 million. THR reports that his annual base salary was decreased by $500,000 to $3 million, and the company got rid of an annual $8 million raise in the CEO’s yearly target bonus.