Disney Heiress Slams The Walt Disney Company After Furloughing 100,000 Employees

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Apr 23, 2020

Disney Heiress Abigail Disney, who is the granddaughter of Walt Disney Company’s co-founder Roy Disney, encouraged the company to do better after they furloughed 100,000 employees.

A report in the Financial Times detailed that Disney was furloughing more than 100,000 employees in order to save up to an estimated $500 million a month. Not only were they furloughing their employees, but the report also indicates that the company was protecting incentive schemes for executive bonuses.

The Financial Times’ Anna Nicolaou and Alex Barker report, “Disney protected incentive schemes, which account for most of the executives’ remuneration. Mr Iger earned $65.6m in 2018 and $47m last year. The latest package is more than 900 times that of the median Disney worker’s earnings, which stands at about $52,000.”

Disney’s Executive Chairman Bob Iger and newly appointed CEO Bob Chapek did give up the remainder of their base salaries for the year. Iger’s yearly salary is reported to be $3 million while Chapek’s is $2.5 million.

In response to the article Abigail Disney penned an extensive thread on Twitter, where she specifically took issue with executive bonuses that total $1.5 billion.

She notes that could “pay for three months salary to front line workers.”

She specifically notes the bonuses are “going to people who have already been collecting egregious bonuses for years.”

Not only does the Disney heiress slam Disney executives like Bob Iger and Bob Chapek for their bonuses, but she also criticizes them for the way they have treated their workers.

Abigail Disney then points out the massive pay discrepancy between Disney’s executive officers, their frontline workers, and the median salary for a Disney employee.

She then calls on Disney to do better saying that while the challenge to the company will be rough it does not “constitute permission to continue pillaging and rampaging by managament.”

She goes on to criticize Disney’s management for $11.5 billion worth of stock buy backs between March 31, 2018 and June 30, 2019.

She then points to Disney’s mismanagement of handling “messes of their own making.”

Abigail Disney then calls on Disney executives to “give up SOME of your already ample compensation.”

She notes that the current crisis has created “an opportunity for change” and encourages Disney executives to “pay the people who make the magic happen with respect and dignity.”

Abigail Disney previously criticized Bob Iger for taking home $66 million in 2019. She stated, “I like Bob Iger. Let me be very clear: I think he’s a good man. But I think he’s allowing himself to go down a road that is the road everyone is going down.”

She added, “When he got his bonus last year, I did the math, and I figured out that he could have given personally, out of pocket, a 15% raise to everyone who worked at Disneyland, and still walked away with $10 million.”

She concluded, “So there’s a point at which there’s just too much going around the top of the system into this class of people who–I’m sorry this is radical–have too much money. There is such a thing.”

A Disney spokesperson responded via a statement to Fast Company at the time, “Disney has made historic investments to expand the earning potential and upward mobility of our workers, implementing a starting hourly wage of $15 at Disneyland that’s double the federal minimum wage, and committing up to $150 million for a groundbreaking education initiative that gives our hourly employees the opportunity to obtain a college or vocational degree completely free of charge.”

What do you make of Abigail Disney’s recent comments regarding The Walt Disney Company’s business practices amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic?

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