-By Warner Todd Huston
This week the SEIU sent out an email to its members hoping to drum up some hate against the fast food chain Wendy’s. The email not only had one outright lie, it was also a sad example of how stupid unions think their members really are.
The email starts out as if it is from a Wendy’s employee named Joshua Williams.
Mr. Williams may or may not really exist, but the union created a video featuring a person claiming to be this Williams fellow, so maybe he’s real and maybe he isn’t. But that isn’t the obvious lie. The obvious lie is in the email’s very first paragraph. The SEIU has been trying to unionize the fast food industry.
Last year, the CEO of Wendy’s took home $16.5 billion dollars while I barely scraped by on $16,000.
The email then goes on to suggest that the fast food industry needs to be unionized so that… oh, I don’t know … maybe so that guys like Mr. Williams can be the ones to take home “$16.5 billion dollars,” or something? Yeah, we all understand that a burger flipper takes exactly the same skills as the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It’s just the same, of course.
Whatever.
But let’s look at the claim of this “Mr. Williams,” if he really exists.
I sure seems a bit crazy that a fast food CEO “took home” $16.5 billion dollars! I mean, some whole countries don’t make so much money. Why, it’s an outrage.
But, wait. $16.5 billion dollars! Really??
No, not even close.
In the Forbes list of American CEOs, the current Wendy’s chief, Emily J. Brolick, is listed with a salary of $338,462 annually and a total compensation package of $4.6 million. Not even a tiny bit close to the lie that the SEIU tried to pass off on its members and potential members. (The AP reported on it here)
Brolick has only been onboard for a short time, so maybe “Joshua Williams” meant the previous CEO? Well, let’s look.
Former Wendy’s CEO Roland Smith left the company in 2011. Before he did he “took home” slightly less than $16.5 billion. Instead, Mr. Smith “took home” a $11.4 million in severance pay. In 2010 he made a paltry $4.9 million.
Gee, that seems a tad less than “$16.5 billion,” doesn’t it?
The union clearly lied.
As one of my friends said in an email, all these unions will do is turn the 99 cent menu into the $99 menu. It would be such a benefit to us all, wouldn’t it?
Click on image to see a screenshot of the full email
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.