Poverty Wages Pose Risk To Fast Food Industry Profits

Fast-food workers’ fight for better pay has taken on new urgency as a report published Tuesday found the wage discrepancy between workers and their CEOs is the highest of any sector — likely hurting employees' morale and posing a risk to the industry’s profits, experts say. In 2013, executive pay was more than a thousand times the average worker’s wage.

The report by liberal think tank Demos calculated that average income inequality within the fast-food industry is more than double that of other industries in the Accommodation and Food Services sector, which already has the highest annual average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of any sector since 2000.

“We found that fast-food [industry] is acutely out of line with the rest of the economy,” said Catherine Ruetschlin, a policy analyst at Demos and author of the report. CEOs at fast-food companies now earn four times more than they did in 2000, while workers’ wages increased 0.3 percent, according to the report.

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