After Five Years in Fighting Disney in Courts, Anaheim Living Wage Law to Take Effect

A milestone date passed with little public notice in Anaheim this week.

Five years ago, on Nov. 6, 2018, the city’s voters approved Measure L, which mandated that “area resort workers” — Disneyland employees, basically — must be paid a living wage if the parent company receives city subsidies.

The Walt Disney Company, which at the time was paying some of its workers the state-mandated $11 an hour minimum, fought the measure bitterly, and the ordinance spent most of the next five years kicking around the state court system as a class-action lawsuit sought to force the company to comply. Only in late October, when the California Supreme Court declined to hear Disney’s final appeal, did Measure L become settled city law.

Partly because of that circuitous path, the impact of the Anaheim vote may have been diminished in some people’s minds. That’s a pity. The law will improve the lives of thousands of current and former Disneyland workers, many of whom are set to receive back pay that could total tens of millions of dollars.

Measure L’s provisions have reset the mandated minimum wage for Anaheim resort workers each year. It will rise to nearly $20 in 2024. That’s a start; according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single person (with no children) living in Orange County would need to make at least $23.66 an hour to cover the cost of basic needs.

In raw-dollar terms, then, Measure L will do what it was designed to: Ease the strain on some of Disney’s lower-wage workers. But there is an important secondary impact of the measure’s passage to consider as well: It convincingly demonstrated what the resort’s unionized workers could accomplish if they coordinated their efforts.

“Unless they worked together, they couldn’t achieve very much,” said Peter Dreier, a labor expert with Occidental College’s Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. “There had been no well-organized effort to build a coalition to force Disney to the bargaining table in a way that would result in better working conditions and pay.”

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In early 2018, Dreier and Daniel Flaming, from the nonprofit Economic Roundtable, co-authored a report that laid bare the dismal living conditions of many Disneyland workers. Among other findings of their survey, almost three-fourths of the resort’s workers said they didn’t make enough to cover basic expenses, and nearly 70% said they were food insecure. More than one in 10 acknowledged they’d been without a place of their own to sleep — or outright homeless — at some point during the previous two years.

“They couldn’t afford to rent an apartment nearby. They were commuting from long distances away. There was no child care,” said Dreier. “When we did that original survey, Disneyland was like a plantation.”

The report broke nationally, casting the Disney company in a harsh light. Perhaps more importantly, it alerted the multiple unions within the resort that their struggles were basically the same — the survey cut across all workers, not just those in a particular low-paying area of work or specialty.

The result was swift and, as time would prove, game-changing. Working together, several unions threw their weight behind the creation of Measure L, got it on the ballot and pushed for its passage, drawing support from Anaheim community groups, including the faith community. Disney executives tried to head off the ordinance by striking quick pay-raise deals with several unions, but Measure L ultimately passed by a wide margin.

Prior to the vote, Disney asked the city of Anaheim to shred two tax-break deals the company had received in an effort to claim it was receiving no city subsidies and therefore wouldn’t have to comply with the wage law. But the subsequent class-action suit, filed on behalf of 25,000 Disney workers, alleged that Disney was still receiving city help on a parking garage construction project. The state’s 4th District Court of Appeal this summer agreed, ordering compliance with the wage law plus back pay, and on Oct. 25 the California Supreme Court declined to hear Disney’s appeal of that ruling.

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Echoes of the unions’ coordinated efforts back in 2018 could be detected during this year’s heightened labor activity, both in California and nationally. In Los Angeles, members of the Writers Guild of America and the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA walked side by side with Teamsters, hotel workers, teachers and others to demand better pay and working conditions.

And more unions have begun comparing notes on what they’re being offered — another effort to leverage their common interests. “We now attend each other’s negotiating sessions,” Susan Minato, co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11, told Capital & Main this summer as disparate unions negotiated with Universal Studios Hollywood theme park on behalf of the park’s workers. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

Despite several notable bargaining victories this year and public support that registers near 60-year highs, unions still face significant barriers to success. Chief among them may be the country’s weak labor laws, which are severely outdated and tilt heavily in favor of employers.

But the ultimate lesson of Anaheim’s move toward a living wage for Disneyland workers, five years ago this week, may well be this: The unions are simply stronger together. And only continued coordination among them will keep them on the path toward wages and benefits that provide their workers a secure life.

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