[ A new film from Abigail Disney, granddaughter of the co-founder
of The Walt Disney Company, takes a look at how workers have been
crushed by a new corporate philosophy.]
[[link removed]]

THE MAGIC KINGDOM IS TRAGIC FOR WORKERS  
[[link removed]]


 

David Dayen
October 7, 2022
American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A new film from Abigail Disney, granddaughter of the co-founder of
The Walt Disney Company, takes a look at how workers have been crushed
by a new corporate philosophy. _

In the film, Disneyland workers explain that they survive on food
stamps, sleep in their cars, and defer medical care and even having
children because of the inadequate pay., Fork Films

 

About ten years ago, Abigail Disney visited the amusement park that
made her family a household name. When she got her tickets, there was
a note shoved in alongside them. It read: “Help us.”

That was the beginning of a journey that culminates in the new film
_The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales
[[link removed]]_. Disney, a filmmaker, philanthropist,
and the granddaughter of Roy Disney, who co-founded The Walt Disney
Company with his brother, chronicles the plight of employees at
Disneyland who are struggling to live on meager pay and benefits, as
well as her efforts to speak out against exorbitant CEO compensation
and a corporate sector that has drifted far away from the stakeholder
capitalism of decades gone by. “It takes people to run a
business,” Roy Disney said in 1965, but today those people are seen
as more like widgets.

“Workers at that park are some of the most important ambassadors for
the brand,” Abigail Disney told me at an interview in a hotel lobby
in North Hollywood. “So it stands to reason that they shouldn’t be
miserable.”

After the “Help us” note, Disney received a Facebook message from
Ralph, a janitor at Disneyland whose wife also works at the park. They
and their four kids live with their mother-in-law, because two people
with full-time jobs still don’t bring in enough at Disneyland to
make it above the poverty line.

“The first time I answered him, I answered him kind of in a very
unsatisfying way,” Disney said. “I was like, what can I do? I
don’t have any influence and I don’t have a place in the company.
But I have a Twitter feed and I have a last name. Teddy Roosevelt has
this great line about do what you can with what you have where you
are. That’s what sat with me and kept me awake at night when I sent
that person that unsatisfying answer. And I had to write him a second
time.”

At a roundtable discussion depicted in the film, “cast members”
(Disney’s name for workers at the park) explained that they survive
on food stamps, sleep in their cars, defer medical care and even
having children because of the financial stress. There’s a clever
juxtaposition in the film between a Republican congressmember going on
about how workers across America are benefiting from prosperity and a
food pantry that workers at Disney set up for their own colleagues.

Yet incredibly, nearly all of the cast members take extreme pride in
their work, seeing the joy they help instill in visitors to the park.
“You know Ralph says it best, he says, ‘We do the pixie dust at
night,’” Disney said. “He’s a janitor, he cleans toilets, but
he thinks of it as pixie dust. And part of what was enraging for me
about it, having met these people and spent time with them, was any
company would be so lucky. They should be thanking their lucky stars
for these people. They are special.”

And the people profiled in _American Dream_ are unionized workers in
California, which has a minimum wage of $15 an hour
[[link removed]] for companies with
more than 25 employees. In Florida, where Disney World sits at the
other end of the Disney empire, the situation is even worse. (The film
focuses on California because there was so much fear from Florida
workers over talking to media.)

This is a function of a Wall Street–led way of doing business. At
one point, the film points out that if Disney executives went against
the grain and raised worker pay, investors would trash the stock.
Disney’s trajectory mirrors the trajectory of corporate America
since the Reagan Revolution: the consolidation of industry, the
skyrocketing of executive pay, and the sacking of labor. The film
describes what has really been a cultural shift, an evisceration of
norms that say workers are a company’s most valuable resource, and
that there is more to a company’s existence than a rapacious search
for profits.

Disney recounted for me the entry of Michael Eisner into the company
in 1984, at a time when it was struggling mightily. Eisner’s
comeback brought forward iconic animation classics like _The Little
Mermaid _and _Beauty and the Beast_, but also this ruthless mindset.
“Disney had swallowed that pill whole,” she said, “that labor is
just a cost, it must be minimized, these are interchangeable cogs in a
larger machine, it does not matter what they feel.” She highlighted
the Disneyland cafeteria as a good symbol of this shift: It was once
shimmering and grand, then it got worse, then it got outsourced, and
finally workers were charged at the same rates visitors were at the
park. “It’s just like the stripping, stripping, one thing at a
time,” she said.

Before _American Dream_, Disney had produced the acclaimed documentary
_Pray the Devil Back to Hell_, about Liberian anti-war activist and
Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, and produced and directed _The
Armor of Light_, about an anti-abortion evangelical exposed to the
realities of gun violence who challenges the dogma from his side. That
experience comes through in this film, co-directed by Disney and Kathy
Hughes, which weaves the history of corporate boldness (what is
described as “an ideological takeover of American life”) with the
continuing precarity of Disneyland workers through furloughs at the
park during the pandemic, as stocks soared.

Getting this to the screen was tortuous. There aren’t many sacred
cows in American film, but criticizing the company that sells about
two out of every five dollars
[[link removed]]
in movie tickets is one of them. “The animators wouldn’t work with
us, the distributors wouldn’t work with us, the theaters
wouldn’t,” Disney told me. “They either want to work with
Disney, used to work with Disney, or just don’t want to piss Disney
off. And Disney is actually quite well known to be a really
mean-spirited company that will come for you.”

Despite that, _The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales _was the
number one documentary on iTunes in its release week. “The fact that
we’ve done this well is a miracle,” Disney said, though the
broader impact has yet to be determined. The message that a beloved
company is working its employees to the bone might easily be drowned
out by that same company’s latest Marvel Universe release.

We’ve heard a lot of this before, but in the hands of someone with
that last name, it’s striking. “I think in history, it’s the
apostates,” Disney said. “Like Angelina Grimké going north and
saying, ‘I give up my inheritance because slavery is wrong.’
There’s something that gets you down to your heart when somebody
does that. Which is why I’m doing what I’m doing because apostates
are important.”

She does recognize that she’s not a particularly powerful apostate.
When she writes then-CEO Bob Iger in the film, asking him to change
his framework for worker wages and CEO pay, she concedes that she
wasn’t expecting much. And, she acknowledges, there’s more to the
problem than just pay—Anaheim is just an unaffordable place to live
for workers of any sort, speaking to a failure of housing policy.

But just exposing the incredible influence Disney has, and what it’s
been willing to do with that power, is enlightening. The city of
Anaheim floated a $500 million bond to build a parking lot for
Disneyland, which it leases to the company for $1 a year. Another
measure, since reversed, gave up the right to tax Disney under any
circumstances. A survey of park workers showed that Iger, at the time
of filming, made 2,000 times more than one of the company’s
custodians. During the pandemic, Iger and some other executives made a
show out of giving up their salary, but the board of directors quietly
gave it back to them.

Finally, of course, getting to know these park employees, the
incredible strain they’re put under, and how ultimately some of them
have to leave a job they love to make ends meet, is powerful. It’s
part of why there are stirrings of a cultural shift back toward a
stakeholder model. The Inflation Reduction Act included a minimum tax
on large corporations and funded the IRS to actually do its job at
collecting what is owed.

Abigail Disney is appropriately skeptical that the paradigm has been
upended. After all, we’re likely headed into a recession, where
we’ll hear more about the need to tighten our belts and relieve the
burdens on business. But she sticks to a simple message. “If you
can’t afford to pay a living wage, you can’t afford to hire a
person,” she said. “Because a person is a person, not a fungible
cost. Not someone who costs this much on a good day and that much on a
bad day.”

 

* workers rights
[[link removed]]
* Disney
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]