Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday called on Disney to use profits from its “Avengers: Endgame” record-breaking opening weekend to pay all employees “a middle class wage.”
The Vermont senator and presidential candidate linked to a Bloomberg article on the superhero film’s opening weekend box office returns, an all-time high of $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 tweeted.
{mosads}Sanders has been a frequent critic of the corporation’s management practices, praising unionized Walt Disney World Resort workers in August after they secured a $15 minimum wage in negotiations with the company. And at California rally in June, he said he wanted “to hear the moral defense of a company that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry.”
In a discussion and viral Twitter thread earlier this month, Roy Disney’s granddaughter Abigail Disney said Iger’s compensation “is insane” and called on the company to shift “some of the profits” to rank-and-file 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.