.@abigaildisney is the outspoken, anti-corporatist Disney heiress - granddaughter of Roy Disney - and she's really angry about the company's decision to furlough 100,000 front-line workers.
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She points out that the top exec paycuts that the company has announced are effectively meaningless, because top Disney management's compensation is only incidentally derived from their salaries.
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The meat of Disney'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's belt-tightening.
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Former CEO Bob Iger, despite foregoing his salary, will still take home 900X the median worker'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'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' 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'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'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'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't be entirely conveyed through training alone. The continuity of culture and knowledge passed among staffers is key.
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If that continuity is shattered, it will add years of disruption to the Parks' operation: breakdowns, customer service failures, logistical snarls, etc. Keeping that furloughed workforce intact isn't just "decent" (as Abigail Disney writes), it's also business-critical.
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