The restaurant industry is a huge minimum-wage employer and lobbies hard against raising the minimum wage—but it
sure does pay its CEOs well:
Last year, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the CEOs of America's top 25 restaurant corporations, including McDonald's, Burger King, the Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, and Jack in the Box, took home an average of 721 times the money minimum wage workers did, and 194 times the take-home of the typical American worker in a production or non-supervisory job. Restaurants and food services employ nearly half of all American workers who earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (or less).
A majority of these workers, remember, are adults who need to support themselves, and many have children. Low fast food wages force many workers onto government assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, meaning that taxpayers are essentially subsidizing the industry's low pay, and workers are denied the wages their efforts merit. But the restaurant industry not only pays its CEOs well, it also hires lobbyists. And the result is a minimum wage that leaves even many full-time workers in poverty and a tipped worker minimum wage that hasn't been raised in more than 20 years.