merelygifted:

 

An heir to the Walt Disney fortune has described the $65.6m (£50.5m) paid to the company’s chief executive, Bob Iger, as “insane”.

 

Abigail Disney, an Emmy award-winning film-maker and a granddaughter of the company’s co-founder Roy Disney, said it was outrageous that Iger was paid 1,424 times more than the average pay for a Disney employee last year. Iger’s 2018 pay package increased by 80% from $36.3m in 2017. He also collected $43.9m in 2016.

 

“Let me be very clear. I like Bob Iger,” said Abigail Disney in a series of 22 tweets on Sunday. “I do NOT speak for my family but only for myself. Other than owning shares (not that many) I have no more say in what happens there than anyone else. But by any objective measure a pay ratio over a thousand is insane.”

 

The tweets followed up a “humane capitalism” speech she gave last week in which she said Iger was a “good man” who had performed well at Disney and deserved a bonus, but such huge pay deals “had a corrosive effect on society”.

 

“When he got his bonus last year, I did the math, and I figured out that he could have given personally, out of pocket, a 15% raise to everyone who worked at Disneyland, and still walked away with $10m,” she said at the Fast Company event in New York.

 

“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. There is such a thing.”

 

Abigail Disney said Iger “certainly” deserved a bonus, but from speaking to workers in Disneyland, it was clear to her they deserved and needed a rise. She said many Disneyland workers were struggling to pay for essentials such as medicine.  …

 

…  She said the Walt Disney Company was not doing enough to reward those who kept it running every day. Specifically, she called on corporate executives to give employees pay rises, rather than one-off bonuses. A rise, she said, would dramatically improve the living standards of workers while having little to no impact on top earners. “Maybe they can’t afford a third home, or another boat,” she said on Twitter. “I’m not being facetious here. That’s the kind of sacrifice we’d be talking about for high-level execs.”  …