Domino’s Pizza boss J Patrick Doyle is getting too large a slice of the pie, shareholders will tell the company’s board at the fast food chain’s annual meeting on Tuesday.
The two largest shareholder advisory groups, ISS and Glass Lewis; CalSTRS, California’s $183bn teachers’ pension fund; and Change to Win investment group, which advises trade union-sponsored pension funds, have all voiced concerns about compensation at the pizza company ahead of Tuesday’s annual shareholder meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Here's what has been so great about having wealth over the past two decades: not only has it been easy to make lots of money from investing that wealth, but taxes have hovered near a historic low on capital gains and stock dividends. So those with assets to deploy have been getting a twofer: High returns, low taxes on those returns.
The American economy overall is ferociously unequal, but some sectors are more unequal than others. A new study from the left-leaning think tank Demos looked at CEO-to-worker compensation ratios across the labor force in an attempt to determine where inequality is most concentrated. The answer probably won’t surprise you.
In 2013, student debt surpassed $1.2 trillion,1 highlighting a disturbing new reality: for an increasing share of students, higher education comes at the cost of long term debt. In 1989, 41 percent of graduating college seniors left school with student loan debt, which averaged $26,600. By 2012, two-thirds of graduating seniors had assumed such debt.2 Higher education was once the gateway to the middle class.
It's no secret that American consumers are fed up with the quality of service they get from any number of retail and restaurant establishments. Going to a fast food joint is especially unpleasant, as Demos documents in its new report, Fast Food Failure.
Executive pay has risen dramatically—both in absolute terms and in relation to median wages—across the last generation. The spike in executive salaries is both a key driver of inequality at the top end of the income spectrum (about half of the “1 percent” are executives or managers at non-financial firms) and a symbolic marker of social norms in our “winner-take-all” economy. Conservative economists have tried to spin this as a triumph of market forces, manifesting the ability of superstar innovators to pull away from the pack in a global, wired economy.
David Novak is the chief executive of Yum! Brands, the parent company that runs Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC. Last year, while Yum! Brands and other restaurant companies lobbied against raising the minimum wage, Novak made at least $22 million—more than 1,000 times what the average fast-food worker makes in a year. In return for paying him so much, Yum! got a tax break.
This week, Apple loudly touted its fealty to environmentalism, rolling out an updated website on what it's doing to be a greener company and playing up its progress in reducing its carbon footprint and removing toxins from its products. This blitz included expensive full-page newspaper ads in places like the Wall Street Journal.
Apple, of course, is just one of many companies that has put a lot of effort into improving its environmental record. Most famously, Walmart has been talking this talk since 2005.
In response to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a Michigan state law banning the consideration of race or ethnicity as a factor among state college admissions, Demos President Heather McGhee issued the following statement:
The country should be recommitting to diversity and inclusion, not retreating.
The news has not been kind to the fast food industry over the past few years. From labor strikes to claims of wage theft, companies like McDonald's and Burger King have taken increasing criticism for treatment of workers and their low wage jobs. Now a new report from New York-based think tank Demos has added fuel to the fire.
The recent op-ed from NAACP LDF president Sherrilyn Ifill on the recent McCutcheon ruling is a must read. In it, she implores us to focus in on the “devastating aspect” of Chief Justice John Roberts's majority opinion ruling as summarized in his opening sentences:
"There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.
(New York, NY) – Today, national public policy organization Demos will release a new report examining the latest CEO-to-worker compensation ratios of the largest publicly traded fast food companies and shows that the fast-food industry has the greatest pay disparity in our economy, with ratios exceeding 1,000-to-1.
(New York, NY) – As shareholders prepare for annual meetings, Demos released a new study today that finds that the fast-food industry has the greatest CEO-to-worker pay disparity in our economy, with ratios exceeding 1,000-to-1. The study finds that the growing disparity within fast-food threatens economic growth and shareholder investment.
David Novak, the CEO of YUM! Brands, which owns Taco Bell and KFC, took home more than $22 million last year after exercising stock options, according to proxy statements. The average full-time fast-food worker, by comparison, would have made about $19,000 on the year. [...]
Fast food CEOs were paid more than 1,200 times the average fast food worker in 2012, according to a new study released Tuesday by Demos, a public policy group.
On a conference call to discuss the report New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said such a wide income disparity could affect the city's pension fund, which holds millions of shares in several fast food companies. And it could trickle down to affect every day New Yorkers, he said. [...]
Fast-food restaurants are serving up plenty of food for discussion in the debate over income inequality.
Fast-food chief executives take home $1,000 for every $1 dollar earned by their average workers, making it the most unequal sector within the U.S. economy, according to a new report from public policy group Demos.
