As Kim Kardashian put it recently, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” It’s a lament that has hardened into a refrain among employers in the United States. But how much are they paying?

Not much, according to a new company wage tracker created by the Economic Policy Institute and the Shift Project, a joint project by the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of California, San Francisco, using survey data collected from Facebook and Instagram users in 2021, with responses from over twenty thousand workers at sixty-six large service-sector firms and an average of 317 respondents per firm. The tracker finds that at many hugely profitable companies, the majority of workers are paid less than $15 an hour.

In the food-service sector, starvation wages remain the norm. Chipotle pays 54 percent of workers less than $15 an hour, even as the company paid CEO Brian Niccol $38 million in 2020. Things are even worse at Dunkin’ (68 percent of workers are paid less than $15 an hour), Burger King (83 percent of workers are paid less than $15 an hour), and McDonald’s (89 percent of workers are paid less than $15 an hour).