Bernie Sanders Challenged Disney To Do Something With That $1.2 Billion 'Avengers' Payout

By Lauren Rearick


Even before debuting in theaters, Disney’s Avengers: Endgame was setting box office records. Since first on Thursday, April 25, 2019, the film has earned more than $1 billion in global ticket sales. Right now, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has an opinion for what Disney could possibly do with all that cash.


In a tweet made on Monday, April 29, 2019, the Democratic presidential candidate wrote, “What could be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, alternatively opposed to paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million – over 1,400 times much because the average worker at Disney makes.” His social media statement was accompanied by a link from Bloomberg that elaborate the continued success of Avengers: Endgame.


Sanders’s tweet comes soon after it was reported by Deadline in January 2019 that Iger derived a 80% increase in his pay from 2017 to 2018, due in part to a stock package given to Iger following Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox. The CEO’s $65.7 million salary is estimated to be 1,424 times that of the average Disney employee salary,


Sanders isn’t the only person to criticize Iger’s pay. In a public appearance made in April 2019, Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney, called for change, Fast Company reported. “When he [Iger] got his bonus last year, I did the math, and I figured out that he may have given personally, out of pocket, a 15% raise to each person who worked at Disneyland, and still walked away with $10 million,” she mentioned. “So there’s a point at which there’s just also much going around the best of the system into this class of people who–I’m sorry this is radical–have also much money.”


Nevertheless Disney hasn't nevertheless acknowledged Sanders’s comment, they had responded to Abigail Disney’s criticisms. In a statement to Fast Company, a spokesperson mentioned, “Disney has made historic investments to expand the earning potential and upward mobility of our workers, implementing a beginning 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 staff the possibility to obtain a college or vocational degree totally free of charge.”


In January, Sanders reintroduced a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 a hour by 2024, up from the current national common of $7.25; at least six other Democratic presidential hopefuls have also pledged to fight for the same increase if they are elected in 2020. For his part, Sanders has called the current minimum wage a “starvation wage.” Per CNBC, he has also pressured organizations like Amazon, McDonald’s, and WalMart to raise their minimum wages up to $15 a hour.