A Little Food For Thought

The CEO of McDonald's restaurants makes $8.75 million dollars a year. That's a lot of money for one of the most notorious low-wage corporations in the country. How long would it take the average McDonald's employee to make that much money? Well assuming the average wage for an employee in one of those fast-food restaurants is $8.75 an hour (a figure which may be too generous) and that employee worked full-time (a 40 hour week), it would take:

* about 1,000,000 hours,

* or about 125,000 days,

* or about 25,000 weeks

* or about 5,774 months

* or about 481 years

In other words, there is absolutely no way a McDonald's employee could ever make as much as the CEO, even assuming that employee got some regular raises, in a lifetime of working. It would take several lifetimes. That may sound fine if you happen to be a CEO, but it just points out how far apart the rich and the working people in this country are -- and the gap between them continues to grow larger, as the rich continue to gobble up an ever increasing share of the nation's income.

Here are a couple of other interesting facts. The CEO's of the 50 companies with the largest number of low-wage workers made an average yearly salary of $9.4 million last year. And in just a few years (by 2020), at least one quarter of all U.S. workers will be in low-wage jobs. I know that sounds great to the nation's CEO's, but for the rest of you -- Is this the America you want?