On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.

The arrangement was an effective visual representation of the outrageous inequality that exists in the United States. The ten chairs represented ten people: five workers struggling to make ends meet, and their five indifferent bosses, too preoccupied to bother attending and too powerful to be compelled.

“I guess they didn’t show up,” Sanders said, gesturing to the vacant chairs. “We made a sincere effort, because I think it would’ve been an extraordinary discussion for them to defend the kind of compensation they get in contrast to the people who work for them.” (I crunched the numbers, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally made over five hundred times the median Amazon workers’ salary during the length of the broadcast.)