2020 Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent out a tweet on April 29 in response to a Bloomberg News report the same day noting that Walt Disney Co. shares hit record levels after the company’s Avengers: Endgame film shattered box-office records. The tweet, which included a link to the Bloomberg report, said: “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.”
Media reports in The Hill and the Washington Post did not say if Sanders’ comments were influenced by recent statements made by Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Disney co-founder Roy Disney, who was quoted in an April 19 report by Fast Company. The Disney heir cited the same compensation figures for Iger mentioned by Sanders, calling that level of pay “insane” and asserting that executive pay at that level has “had a corrosive effect on society.”
Disney made her statements at the first annual Fast Company Impact Council on April 18. She also wrote an op-ed on the subject that was published by the Post on April 24, saying, “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.”
The Post, which described Sanders as “the democratic socialist from Vermont,” said that Disney didn’t immediately return the newspaper’s request for comment on Sanders’ statement. However, when Abigail’s op-ed was published by the Post on April 24, a spokesperson for Disney sent Vanity Fair the following statement:
Let’s look at the facts: Disney has made historic investments to expand the earning potential and upward mobility of our workers, implementing a starting hourly wage of $15 at Disneyland that’s double the federal minimum wage, and committing up to $150 million for a groundbreaking education initiative that gives our hourly employees the opportunity to obtain a college or vocational degree completely free of charge. Mr. Iger’s compensation is 90 percent performance-based and he has delivered exceptional value for shareholders: Disney’s market capitalization has grown exponentially over the last decade, rising $75 billion in the last month alone, and the stock price has increased to $132 a share from $24 a share when Mr. Iger became C.E.O. in 2005 — all of which directly benefits literally thousands of employees who hold our stock.”
As The New American observed last March: “Let the free market continue to determine what [corporate CEOs] should be paid, and ignore complaints about fairness from the likes of Bernie [Sanders] and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] who know nothing of the matter.” Prior to being elected to public office, both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez faired poorly earning an income in the free market.
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