dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-call-out-my-familys-company--and-anyone-else-rich-off-their-workers-backs/2019/04/23/5d4e6838-65ef-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d3ccf8b88aec

This is the kind of stuff that gives Bernie Sanders traction. Is it Immoral? What do you think?

By Abigail Disney April 23
Abigail Disney is the president of Fork Films, founder of Peace is Loud and co-founder of Level Forward.

This past weekend, I seem to have struck a nerve with a Twitter thread about wage ine******y at the Walt Disney Co. — it is important to note that I speak only for myself and not for my family. The thread went v***l, partly because of my name. But I suspect it would be far harder to get that reaction if my last name were Procter or Gamble. That’s because the Disney brand occupies a special place in our economic landscape. Its profits are powered by emotion and sentiment and, yes, something as fundamental as the difference between right and wrong. I believe that Disney could well lead the way, if its leaders so chose, to a more decent, humane way of doing business.

I had to speak out about the naked indecency of chief executive Robert Iger’s pay. According to Equilar, Iger took home more than $65 million in 2018. That’s 1,424 times the median pay of a Disney worker. To put that gap in context, in 1978, the average CEO made about 30 times a typical worker’s salary. Since 1978, CEO pay has grown by 937 percent, while the pay of an average worker grew just 11.2 percent.

This growth in ine******y has affected every corner of American life. We are increasingly a lopsided, barbell nation, where the middle class is shrinking, a very few, very affluent people own a great deal and the majority have relatively little. What is more, as their wealth has grown, the super-rich has invested heavily in politicians, policies and social messaging to pad their already grotesque advantages.

In 2017, with the quiet encouragement of corporations across the country, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. As billions of dollars landed in the laps of management, they spent as a rule not on their workforces but on wealth-enriching strategies such as stock buybacks and, yes, executive pay.

In 2018, Disney gave more than 125,000 employees a $1,000 bonus. But that $125 million or so was dwarfed by the $3.6 billion it spent to buy shares back to drive up its stock price and thus enrich its shareholders. Given that about 85 percent of stocks are held by the richest people in the country, this was a significant new investment in wealth ine******y.

I have been quietly grumbling about this issue for some time now, uncertain how public to be. It is time to call out the men and women who lead us and to draw a line in the sand about how low we are prepared to let hard-working people sink while top management takes home ever-more-outrageous sums of money. It is unreasonable to expect corporate boards to act as a check on this trend; they are almost universally made up of CEOs, former CEOs and people who long to be CEOs.


Disney has pushed back by noting that it pays more than the $7.25 federal minimum wage. This argument fails to acknowledge that the cost of living varies from place to place and few can make do on that, no matter where they live. It also fails to recognize that the company worked quietly to try to defeat a b****t initiative to lift the minimum wage paid by certain employers to $15 an hour in Anaheim, Calif., which passed this past November.

At a company that has never been more profitable, whose top executives drive home with seven- and eight-figure paychecks and whose primary resource is the good-spirited, public-facing people who greet guests day after day, why are we dancing around a minimum wage anyway? I’m not arguing that Iger and others do not deserve bonuses. They do. They have led the company brilliantly. I am saying that the people who contribute to its success also deserve a share of the profits they have helped make happen.

There are just over 200,000 employees at Disney. If management wants to improve life for just the bottom 10 percent of its workers, Disney could probably set aside just half of its executive bonus pool, and it would likely have twice as much as it would need to give that bottom decile a $2,000 bonus. Besides, at the pay levels, we are talking about, an executive giving up half his bonus has zero effect on his quality of life. For the people at the bottom, it could mean a ticket out of poverty or debt. It could offer access to decent health care or education for a child.

Here is my suggestion to the Walt Disney Co. leadership. Lead. If any of this rings any moral bells for you, know that you are uniquely situated to model a different way of doing business. Reward all of your workers fairly. Don’t turn away when they tell you they are unable to make ends meet. You do not exist merely for the benefit of shareholders and managers. Reward all the people who make you successful, help rebuild the American middle class and respect the dignity of the men and women who work just as hard as you do to make Disney the amazing company it is.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/17/abigail_disney_criticism_of_disney_company

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “The Happiest Place on Earth.” That’s how Disneyland describes itself. But that’s not the experience of thousands of its workers. And now it’s the heiress of the Disney fortune who is once again speaking out about the company’s unfair labor and wage practices, after speaking to employees at the California theme park. Earlier this year, Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, the co-founder of Walt Disney Company, made headlines when she called Disney CEO Bob Iger’s salary, quote, “insane.”

AMY GOODMAN: In an op-ed for The Washington Post headlined “It’s time to call out Disney—and anyone else rich off their workers’ backs,” Abigail Disney wrote, quote, “Iger took home more than $65 million in 2018. That’s 1,424 times the median pay of a Disney worker. … At the pay levels we are talking about, an executive giving up half his bonus has zero effect on his quality of life. For the people at the bottom, it could mean a ticket out of poverty or debt. It could offer access to decent health care or an education for a child,” unquote. Abigail Disney also testified in May at the House Committee on Financial Services.

Well, for more, we go to Abigail Disney, filmmaker, activist, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney—co-founder of The Walt Disney Company—speaking to us from Cork, Ireland.

Abigail, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Talk about what you found.

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Well, you know, it was pretty clear what was happening there was that they were working to take those low-wage workers at Disney and basically turn them into people who had no recourse for appeal and no time enough to be able to stand up for themselves as workers, so that they would have an eternally refreshing class of people that would replace the ones who were unhappy.

So, it was—when I was young, it was a job for life, which is now not a thing in capitalism anymore. But there was the sense we had a responsibility as a company to take care of the people who took care of us, who were very much a part of the equation in terms of making the place a place you wanted to come back to. And now we’re just basically seeing them as, you know, endlessly replaceable people. There’s a kind of a given, you know, among people at the high end of the business world, that low-sk**led workers, as they call them, are endlessly replaceable, and they a little bit deserve what they get, because they don’t have higher sk**ls.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what’s been the reaction among company executives to your continued raising of criticism of them?

AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention your family.

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah. Two of my siblings are very supportive of what I’m doing. I also have members of my family who are not pleased. But the company has not reached out to me directly, interestingly enough. I think they see me as a gadfly and a problem. So, they tend to pick up the phone and call whoever just interviewed me, and dress them down. They’re sending out targeted tweets to everybody on my Twitter follower page and telling them about their education program. So, they kind of shadow me, and they slap back with the idea that they pay a lot for education—which has nothing to do with paying the people who work today a fair price for the work they did today.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you, when you testified—well, a 2017 study from Occidental College that surveyed 17,000 Disneyland workers, more than half the resort’s employees, found many struggle to make ends meet. Ten percent reported having been homeless within the past two years. Two-thirds said they couldn’t afford to eat three meals a day. Three-quarters, 75%, said they were unable to pay all their bills at the end of each month. So, Abigail Disney, what are you calling for? We’re talking about your family’s company.

ABIGAIL DISNEY: You know, what I’m trying to do is have a have-you-no-sense-of-decency moment here, because, you know, we can quibble about CEO salaries until the end of time and who deserves what. And that’s the other thing they clap back at me with, is, “Look at the profitability of the company. Of course he deserves a big salary.” OK, that might or might not be true. We can talk about that. But if the company is so profitable, why are there people going hungry?

So, you know, we need to have a moment here and check in with what our values are, as a society, and say to ourselves, “If people are doing that well at the top, how can we allow people who are working a full-time job, who are playing by every freaking rule, and allow them to go hungry and without healthcare and without housing?”

AMY GOODMAN: And what does the CEO say, Iger, to what you said? How much does he make?

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Well, OK, so, for 2019, it will be over $140 million, technically, all in. When I started this, I started using the lower number, because—

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah, OK. So, it’s $66 million for 2019, and when the merger goes through, $140 [million].

AMY GOODMAN: And the merger is with?

ABIGAIL DISNEY: With Fox. And they will be the largest media entity in the history of the United States or anywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re going to do Part 2 with you. We’re going to post it online at democracynow.org and find out exactly what the workers did say to you at Disneyland. Abigail Disney, filmmaker, activist, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney—the co-founder of The Walt Disney Company.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/18/disney_heiress_meets_with_disneyland_workers_calls

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Abigail Disney
filmmaker, activist and heiress of the Disney fortune.
Image Credit: Jeremy Wong
We continue our conversation with Abigail Disney, the heiress of the Disney fortune, who is once again speaking out against the company’s unfair labor and wage practices. She recently spoke to Disneyland employees in California, where they shared their experiences with the theme park’s work environment. In the past, Abigail Disney has criticized Disney CEO Bob Iger’s obscene salary and the drastic pay gap between Iger and other Disney employees. Abigail Disney also testified in May at the House Committee on Financial Services during a hearing on strengthening the rights and protections of workers.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our interview with the heiress of the Disney fortune, who’s once again speaking out about the company’s unfair labor and wage practices, after speaking to workers at Disneyland in California. Earlier this year, Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, the co-founder of Walt Disney Company, made headlines when she called Disney CEO Bob Iger’s salary “insane.” Abigail Disney testified in May at the House Committee on Financial Services.

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Does a CEO’s pay have any relationship to what his hotel maids and janitors get? Do the people who spend a lifetime at the lowest inch of the wage spectrum deserve what they get, or does any full-time worker deserve the dignity of a living wage?

Disney is not just any company. It is not U.S. Steel or Procter & Gamble or any other iconic American brand. The Disney brand is an emotional one, a moral one. I would even say it is a brand that suggests love. I have spoken up as a Disney—about Disney because I’m uniquely placed to do so and because Disney is uniquely placed in American life. Those moral undertones and all that love need to be put to constructive use, because this is a moral issue.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Abigail Disney testifying before Congress. She’s a filmmaker, an activist, the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney—again, co-founder of The Walt Disney Company. Abigail Disney has been very outspoken on the issue of wage ine******y. She wrote a widely circulated opinion piece in The Washington Post headlined “It’s time to call out Disney—and anyone else rich off their workers’ backs.” She’s joining us from Cork, Ireland.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Abby. Can you start off by talking about what your message was to Congress and what you’re hoping to accomplish right now?

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Right. Well, I’ve been hoping to take the wage issue on by way of Disney, because it’s such a stark and clear problem, that in the same year, at the same company, you have one employee who comes home with $140 million, and another employee that goes home, for a full day’s work, and doesn’t have enough money to pay for their insulin. It’s in the same year of record profitability at the same company. And frankly, they’re less than 30 miles from each other. This should trouble us all. This cannot be abided.

So there’s a—first of all, there’s a practical reason not to be doing these things. But also there’s really a moral question, and that’s the one I think we need to take on. We cannot continue to just look the other way as one class of people gets wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. And if you make $140 million in a year, I ask you: What can you not afford? How can you possibly use that money? And how can you sleep at night, given what’s happening at the other end?

AMY GOODMAN: So, you went to Disneyland in California, and you spoke to workers there. Some reports misidentified, said that you had gone undercover. You didn’t go undercover?

ABIGAIL DISNEY: No. No, no, no, no. No. I mean, why would I go undercover anyway? I mean, I don’t think anybody there knows what I look like. You know, it’s a free country; I could go there if I want. No, I spoke with workers at their union headquarters, off property, and just sat with them. All I wanted was for them to look me in the eye and tell me what was going on, because, you know, I had heard a lot of things from very partisan places. I wanted to really hear the whole story myself.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you hear? And also, I mean, it is interesting, if they knew who you were—you’re the heiress to the Disney fortune. You’re the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who founded Disney. How did they—first, how did they respond to that? And were they curious about why you were so interested?

Continued

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Well, Disney is a really special company. I mean, that’s why this is so important to me. You know, when people find out my name and they hear “Disney,” it’s a very different reaction than it would be if it were Rockefeller or something like that, because it means something really special to the people who work there, to people across the country.

People who come to work there believe, every morning they get out of bed, and they go to their job, and they make the world a better place. That is [inaudible] genuinely are committed to doing, by giving families an experience that is unlike any other experience and that is basically like glue for families. So, they’re very committed to what they do.

And so, when I go in and meet with the workers, first of all, they’re really happy to meet me, because they know I have this direct link back to the founders and the people who, you know, created this whole idea. So, first of all, there’s always a bonding that happens when I go into a meeting with a lot of Disney workers.

But then, you know, this particular meeting took a turn. And that’s when they started to really talk to me about their lived experience of, for instance—as an example, you have a woman in the makeup department who is doing the same 9-to-10-hour days for the same amount of money she was doing it two years ago for, only now there are 200 people in a department that used to have over 250. So, they’re doing the same amount of work in less time—I’m sorry, in more time for the same amount of money. And that’s one way that they force productivity on workers, you know, and bring down the total cost of what they’re doing. This is the kind of thing that’s being forced on them.

And what she said to me was really important. She said, “I don’t know if I can continue to do the quality of work that I want to be doing because I love this company, because I love the mission of this company. I want to do the high-quality work, but I can’t, because I can’t pay for insulin”—in this particular case.

So, you know, if you have employees that are that committed to your company and who really believe in that, you should consider yourself very lucky. And Disney has been able to squeeze more and more productivity out of their workers for less and less and less money, and less and less in compensation of a variety of kinds, because of that goodwill that employees take to the company. And they’re going to—they’re going to squeeze that dry. And once they squeeze that dry, they can’t recover from that.

AMY GOODMAN: So, earlier this year, in March, Disney bought 21st Century Fox, in a $71.3 billion merger. Can you talk about this and what the implications are and what Disney will now own?

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah. Well, you know, in the ’80s, when Reagan began to sort of take on the FCC and the rules for broadcasting—and he made a lot of rules changes without going through Congress—and every progressive commentator at the time said, “Oh my god! This is terrible, the corporatization of media.” Well, everything they had to say in the 1980s has played out exactly as we worried. It has destroyed news departments. It has decreased the amount and quality of information we all get. It has consolidated power in a handful of people. And so, the quality of the films and the television that we get is also decreasing, in my opinion.

So, what this is is the apotheosis of media consolidation. And that should frighten us all. We really should be worried about where our information and where the films and the popular culture that shape you and I and our children and grandchildren is being affected in a deleterious way, by the narrowing of the source of material. So, it’s going to continue to narrow our minds and narrow our spirits.

Disney, when this merger happens, will be the largest media entity in the history of the universe, as far as I can tell. I mean, I think that’s accurate. And how do we check their power? How do we make sure that they’re doing what they are obligated to do, not just from a legal perspective, but also from a moral and social perspective? We have no recourse with entities like this. And, you know, if we have a problem with the way they do their job, that’s just tough.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in looking at news reports, first, has the company responded to what you’re saying? Company telling other media outlets it pays workers above the federal minimum wage, with a starting hourly wage of $15 an hour, at California’s Disneyland. The company is committed, they say, to $150 million to its Disney Aspire program, that pays for workers to earn a college, high school or vocational degree. The average salary, they say, $46,127. You point out Iger, this next year, will be making what? A total of something like $140 million.

ABIGAIL DISNEY: Right, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I don’t care how many times they say all of those things. Just look at the contrast between $140 million and $46,000. We know that a living wage in Anaheim is more like $24. So when they, after years of fighting tooth and nail, went to the $15 minimum—and it was only just this year—they raised it to a minimum that still wasn’t a living wage.

So, and then, if you put into context the $150 million they spend on the Aspire program, against the multibillions of dollars they spent in share buybacks because of their Trump windfall, if you add to that the fact that they gave bonuses—OK?—in a year when they got permanent tax relief, and they could have, if they gave bonuses that year, given salary increases as a—you know, that’s just—it’s an insult. It’s an insult to these workers. It doesn’t matter if they’re going to get educated in terms of what they did today. Pay them for the work that they did today, and pay them fairly. And if they’re working full time, and you’re at record profitability, there is simply no excuse for paying a sub-living wage to any worker.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you going to do with all of this now, Abby? You’re a filmmaker. You’re an activist. You’ve been interviewing the Disney workers. Are you planning to make a film about this, about your life, about your family?

ABIGAIL DISNEY: I am, yeah. So, I’m going to make a film about the ine******y issue, because, you know, Disney is just synecdoche, right? It just is a reflection of everything that’s happened in American business culture for the last 50 years, especially the 50 years since Milton Friedman published his first op-ed. And the anniversary of that will be next September. So, I want to kind of take that on and really put it into context: what has happened to the American worker, why has it happened, and what it is that we tolerate here on planet wealthy that has changed in 50 years.

You know, it happens—one of the things Americans are least equipped to handle is changes that happen slowly. We seem not to be able to fight the things that are glacial in their pace. And we have allowed for a change in the ethos in our country to happen to us. And we need to really draw a line in the sand now and make sure people understand what it is they’re tolerating, and make sure this is really still OK with everyone, because I actually think that the vast majority of Americans, Trump v**ers included, do not want to live in a country that is this unfair.

AMY GOODMAN: Abigail Disney, we want to say thank you so much for joining us, filmmaker, activist, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney—co-founder of Walt Disney Company—wrote a widely circulated opinion piece in The Washington Post earlier this year headlined “It’s time to call out Disney—and anyone else rich off their workers’ backs.” We’ll link to that piece.

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

One simple solution would be to put a limit on a corporations amount of stock they can buy back.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Hmmm... Possibly.

Wasn't Disney originally family-owned? She raises some good points in her essay and interview about the mergers, acquisitions, and concentration of business in different sectors of the economy, not just entertainment. "Too Big To Fail" often get their comeuppance when they least expect it, coming out of nowhere if they get too complacent and cumbersome like dinosaurs. There is no loyalty anymore.

Are we letting corporations get away with too much control over our personal lives by letting them have more power than we would ever allow the government to have? This is a conundrum. I think the answer is yes, especially where Silicon Valley is concerned.

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

Definitely. I actually believe a high percentage of young people wouldn’t care if Putin became president as long as they could have their gadgets.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

I am afraid you may be right.