Last year, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the CEOs of America’s top 25 restaurant corporations, including McDonald’s, Burger King, the Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, and Jack in the Box, took home an average of 721 times the money minimum-wage workers did, and 194 times the take-home pay of the typical American worker in a production or nonsupervisory job. Restaurants and food services employ nearly half of all American workers who earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (or less).
The report “confirms what we have long known,” Cherri Delesline, a McDonald’s crew member and mother of four in Charleston, South Carolina, told Mother Jones. Since November 2012, she and hundreds of other fast-food workers have gone on strike in 150 American cities and 80 foreign cities, demanding they be paid $15 per hour. “While CEOs make millions of dollars in profits, we still can’t afford to pay our rent or buy clothes for our children,” says Delesline, whose hourly pay is $7.35.
“It’s a picture of uncontrolled greed,” EPI vice president Ross Eisenbrey says. “How can it be that the CEOs are making more in half a day than many of their workers are making in an entire year—and yet they can’t afford to raise the pay of those workers?” CEO pay has been out of control across all business sectors since at least the late-1980s, he adds. From 1978 to 2013, for instance, average CEO compensation, adjusted for inflation, soared nearly 1,000 percent, while the typical worker’s pay increased by just over 10 percent.
Roughly 1 in 10 American workers are employed by restaurants, according to the National Restaurant Association. The industry, the trade group predicts, will see $683 billion in sales this year—up 17 percent over 2010. But a greater share of those revenues has been flowing to top executives. As this interactive graph shows, CEO compensation at America’s top restaurant chains has ballooned since 2008, while the annual take of their lowest-paid workers has largely flatlined. (This analysis assumes tipped workers reach the federal minimum wage through base pay and tips, although that isn’t always the case, as we’ve reported previously.)
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Story: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/epi-study-restaurant-ceo-minimum-wage-workers-pay-gap