Yeah, right. Laws are just cobwebs to corporations as rich and powerful as Walt Disney Co. Still, wow. $233 million owed to over 51,000 current & former Disney workers, which the multi-billion-dollar multinational has refused to pay for OVER SIX YEARS now. Over six years – that’s how long it’s been since Measure L’s “living wage” was supposed to go into effect, and how long it’s been that Disney owes their workers all this money.

2018’s Measure L was smart, combining and addressing two things Anaheim voters were getting sick and tired of:

1. The subsidies (usually tax rebates in the hundreds of millions) to wealthy hoteliers who didn’t need them, including Disney, and
2. the vast majority of workers at our resort businesses, especially Disneyland, being paid low wages they couldn’t live on, and depending on public assistance, as documented in the 2018 survey “Working for the Mouse.” From that survey’s executive summary:

“…Disneyland employees report high instances of homelessness, food insecurity, ever-shifting work schedules, extra-long commutes, and low wages. While there is national attention on the minimum wage and have been successful local efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than 85% of Disneyland workers earn less than $15 an hour. Notwithstanding their economic hardships, 80% of employees say they are ‘proud of the work I do at the Disneyland Resort.’”

So Measure L was proposed, requiring any “hospitality industry businesses that receive city subsidies” to pay, starting in Jan. 2019, $15 an hour, going up year by year. And Anaheim voters approved that 54.2% to 45.8%, understanding this was MOSTLY about Disney – and how often do Anaheim voters stand up to Disney? In retrospect most of the opposition came from the Chamber of Commerce and their paid blogger Matt Cunningham, Disney never really pulled out its big guns against the Measure. In retrospect, Disney was never planning to follow Measure L.

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I keep thinking of the late Anaheim hotelier Bill O’Connell, who succumbed to cancer last year. Few would call him a nice guy, or especially generous. He was famous as the well-connected hotelier who enjoyed the first notorious luxury hotel subsidy, the $158 million “Gardenwalk Giveaway.” I found myself sitting near Bill at a 2018 council meeting, where Measure L was being discussed – a measure that would certainly apply to him – and I asked his thoughts. “Well, if the people pass this,” muttered Bill O’Connell, “we’ll have to follow it, we’ll have to sit down and make it work. Won’t be the end of the world.”

And the Measure passed, and Bill O’Connell complied with it. As did the subsidized Wincome Hotels. As did the dozens and dozens of smaller businesses adjacent to the subsidized resort giants, who were also covered by the Measure. BUT NOT DISNEY. Not the Anaheim-dominating multinational that makes $6.7 billion a year here, $18 million a day, and pays its CEO $41MM.

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Let me just rush through this because you guys already know most of it by memory:

• 2018, Disney quickly tore up their two most recent subsidies (as illustrated above) and declared themselves NOT COVERED by Measure L.
• 2019, Disney workers, remembering the bond Anaheim took out in the 90’s to build Disney’s Mickey & Friends Garage, a bond we are STILL paying off, sued saying “Hell yeah Disney is still subsidized.”
• 2020, COVID hit, slowing everything down to the pace of a sow bug crawling through molasses.
• November ’21 Judge Claster sided with Disney, claiming the Garage deal was somehow not a subsidy (Anaheim city attorney Fabela shamefully agreeing.) The workers appealed.
• July ’23 (!!) Court of Appeals, followed by the Cal. Supreme Court in October, sided with the workers, affirming that Disney is subsidized and must follow Measure L. It has now been four years and ten months since Measure L was supposed to take effect.
• Defeated Disney begins paying its current employees the Measure L Living Wage which at that point is $19.40 an hour (and rising yearly) but says it’ll take a long time for them to figure out all the back pay, interest, penalties they owe, along with tracking down former workers they owe money to.
• And it sure does take a long time – December ’24 they computed $233 million owed to 51,000 workers. Ten days ago, Jan. 17, 2025, Judge Claster smiled upon this agreement, and set a final hearing (?) for February 28, at which time all these workers should be getting COMMUNICATIONS about how much is owed to them. SIX YEARS & two months after Disney could’ve just been following the law.

51,000 Workers Ripped Off. Let’s Meet a Few.

I talked to several Disney workers or “cast members” as they call themselves, to see how Disney’s defiance of Anaheim voters and refusal for over six years to pay what they owe is actually affecting their lives. Some of them agreed to be named, some of them asked not to be, none of them are pictured here.

It doesn’t sound much better than it did back in 2018 when “Working for the Mouse” came out. Some of these workers are still living in their cars, one in a women’s homeless shelter, ALL of them “living paycheck to paycheck,” most in “deep debt.” Some lost their homes over these six years, and started to “sleep in motels with their kids.”

2019 was a heady time, a time of excitement and anticipation waiting for Measure L to kick in for Disney cast members, but it never did. When COVID hit, Disney complained so much about that that many workers got the impression that the pandemic was the reason they weren’t seeing a living wage. Of course the pandemic was much harder on these low-paid workers than on the deep-pocketed multinational.

26-year old custodian Matthew Zepeda began working at Disney shortly after Measure L passed, and he says it really rankled everyone that even the McDonald’s across the street from Disneyland’s Main Gate was complying with Measure L and paying their workers $18 an hour, while most Disney workers were still getting a measly $15.50. Even with the raise Disney was forced to pay when they lost their case in ’23, Matthew has to live with his parents. Frustrated on behalf of all his fellow workers, he has become a “shop steward” with the union. (It was another shop steward, Bryan, a restaurant cashier, who told me he has co-workers who live in their cars, and one in a homeless shelter.)

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Well? Don’t you think SOME Burbank decision-maker(s), responsible for illegally damaging SO many people’s lives, should face SOME sort of consequence, some sort of punishment? Besides just having made a bad and irresponsible bet with their company’s finances?

Do you see why we were so irritated at the 2024 Disneyland Forward hearings when a Disney VP boasted of paying their employees “$19.90 an hour,” without mentioning that we practically had to drag them behind a truck to make them do that?

Will you remember when this company that makes $18 million a day in this town tries to impress us with its generosity by donating $5 million to a homeless shelter or $15 million to fire victims, that they’ve kept their “cast members,” the ones who actually “make the magic happen,” living in poverty as long as they could get away with it?

Most of all, will Anaheim voters remember, when Disney comes around again in ’26 and ’28 telling you who to put on Council, acting like they give a mouse’s ass about what’s good for Anaheim’s people, that this company DEFIED your vote to pay its workers a Living Wage, defied you to the bitter end?

Just sayin’. That is all.