Disney CEO responds to criticism from Bernie Sanders: ‘How many jobs have you created?’
Disney CEO Bob Iger isn’t letting Bernie Sanders’ comments on the company’s wages slide.
“To Bernie Sanders: We created 11,000 new jobs at Disneyland in the past decade, and our company has created 18,000 in the U.S. in the last five years,” Iger wrote in a private Facebook post, The Wrap reports. “How many jobs have you created? What have you contributed to the U.S. economy?”
On Tuesday, during a rally just down the street from Disneyland, Sanders asked: “Anybody make a living wage working for Disney? It’s an example of what we’re talking about when we talk about a rigged economy.” Sanders said it would be “very nice of the Disney corporation to start building factories in the United States,” and asserted that “Disney pays its workers wages that are so low that many of them are forced to live in motels because they cannot afford a decent place to live. People are asking, is it right that at Disneyland, you have a CEO making $46 million while they’re paying their workers starvation wages?”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Disney told The Wrap that Sanders “clearly doesn’t have his facts right. The Disneyland Resort generates more than $5.7 billion annually for the local economy, and as the area’s largest employer, has added more than 11,000 jobs over the last decade, a 65 percent increase. These numbers don’t take into account our $1 billion expansion to add a Star Wars-themed land, which will create thousands of additional jobs across multiple sectors.”