The granddaughter of Disney’s co-founder has escalated her campaign against excessive boardroom pay at the company. Abigail Disney argues top executive bonuses should be halved with the excess money given to its lowliest paid workers. The heiress and documentary film-maker, who in a string of tweets on Sunday said the $65.7m Disney CEO Bob Iger earned last year was “insane”, wrote in an editorial published by the Washington Post that Walt Disney should cut boardroom pay to “help rebuild the American middle class”. Disney could set aside half of its executive bonus pool to give the bottom decile of workers an extra $2,000, Ms Disney claimed. She said this would double the reward that 125,000 of Disney’s rank and file employees received last year, when they earned a bonus of $1,000 each. Mr Iger’s total compensation last year was 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney worker, she said. Disney has responded to the criticisms by saying that it had “made historic investments” in employee earnings, including a starting hourly wage of $15 at Disneyland and a $150m initiative to pay for hourly workers’ college educations.

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The Financial Times