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. @abigaildisney is the outspoken, anti-corporatist Disney heiress - granddaughter of Roy Disney - and she& #39;s really angry about the company& #39;s decision to furlough 100,000 front-line workers.
https://twitter.com/abigaildisney/status/1252665806334410752
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https://twitter.com/abigaildisney/status/1252665806334410752
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She points out that the top exec paycuts that the company has announced are effectively meaningless, because top Disney management& #39;s compensation is only incidentally derived from their salaries.
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The meat of Disney& #39;s exec compensation comes from the $1.5B it pays out in bonuses every year, and that figure has not been affected by the company& #39;s belt-tightening.
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Former CEO Bob Iger, despite foregoing his salary, will still take home 900X the median worker& #39;s salary (this despite two shareholder votes to rein in exec pay).
Disney fought hard against a $15 wage for Parks employees, but since they won it, the company spun it for PR.
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Disney fought hard against a $15 wage for Parks employees, but since they won it, the company spun it for PR.
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But the $15 wage is now $0, because those workers are furloughed. Iger& #39;s pay-packet could fully cover the annual wages of 1,500 of them. CEO Bob Chapek (who used to run the Parks division), will still take home 288 Parks workers& #39; annual pay.
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And, as Abigail Disney points out, these executive bonuses are being paid to a team that greenlit $11.5B in stock buybacks, which drained the company& #39;s cash reserves. Today, the company is BORROWING billions to stay afloat during the crisis.
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Bonuses should reward foresight and good judgment. Plunging the company into debt through financial engineering is not evidence of either. As Abigail Disney says, though the pandemic wasn& #39;t foreseeable, an emergency of some kind certainly was.
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Abigail Disney finishes by calling on the company management to show true leadership by foregoing all of their compensation, not just their salaries - to share in the pain that the 100,000 furloughed workers are going to endure.
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These, after all, are the workers whom the leadership showers with honeyed words ("Our ability to do good in the world starts with our cast members . . . who create magic every day. Our commitment to them will always be our top priority." -R Chapek).
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Those honeyed words are justified, as it happens. Disney Parks employees don& #39;t just do an excellent job - they also represent storehouses of esoteric knowledge about the peccadilloes and idosyncracies of a bunch of bespoke buildings and machines.
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These are effectively giant mechanical cocktail shakers that the company puts the richest, most litigious people in the world into for 12+ hours/day, 365 days/year. The company needs the skilled operators and staffers to come back.
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Working at a Disney Park - even in food service, custodial, etc - requires a bunch of specialized knowledge that can& #39;t be entirely conveyed through training alone. The continuity of culture and knowledge passed among staffers is key.
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