Cynthia “Cyn” Carranza meticulously scavenged for a shady parking spot in the car she called home.

The overnight custodian at Disneyland has to sleep during the day - a difficulty for anyone, let alone when you’re living in your car with two dogs. Ms Carranza says she makes $20.65 an hour (about £15.99) at the park but last summer, she couldn’t afford rent in this Southern California city where the average apartment can run more than $2,000 (about £1,550) a month.

…

Ms Carranza, like others who work at the park, detailed to the BBC the financial hardships that come with working at what’s supposed to be the “Happiest Place on Earth”. About 10,000 union workers at Disneyland - the first of 12 parks created around the globe - are threatening to strike over the wages and what they say are retaliatory anti-union practices.

Hundreds of workers protested outside the park this week, with an array of signs and pins showing Mickey Mouse’s gloved fist in defiance.

“Mickey would want fair pay,” workers chanted outside Disneyland near the park’s gates.

They voted almost unanimously to authorise strike action on Friday, just days before union contract negotiations for workers are set to resume.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
    29·
    4 months ago

    Part of the problem is that the main anti-Disney political coalition doesn’t want to address the local housing crisis; they want the region to go back to being a suburban sprawl.

    You could easily build dense housing in the area that meets the balloon test, but Disney doesn’t want to push it and the anti-coalition doesn’t want it either.

      • Billiam@lemmy.world
        20·
        4 months ago

        You’d need some serious regulation and enforcement. Company towns have historically been, uh… not great.

        For example, imagine Disney rents apartments cheap to their employees but still underpays them. Now they’re stuck working for Disney because they can’t afford the rent offsite and can’t save enough to quit.

          • Seleni@lemmy.world
            5·
            4 months ago

            Oh dear. Education has really failed this country.

            Even in cases where companies may have the workers’ best interests at heart, company towns ultimately lead to a lack of personal freedom. If churches are selected for residents at the company’s whim, that means that other denominations and entire religions are left out in the cold. Choices—whether bad or good—are taken out of the residents’ hands. Recreation is dictated by companies, and anything that may be perceived as uncouth or immoral is no longer an option. Personal exploration is thinned to none, and a utopia quickly becomes a force of oppression.

            In the case of less well-intentioned towns, matters get only worse. In some locations, companies would compensate workers with a scrip—a monetary substitute that was valid only at stores owned by that same company. As there were no competitors for these monopolistic stores, buildings, and services, the price was fully at the discretion of the owner. Housing costs, groceries, and other necessities then became exorbitantly priced.

            Since the company that owned the town knew that all the residents had steady, reliable jobs, some of them allowed shoppers who were financially strapped to simply charge goods and services to a tab as needed. Of course, this meant that workers quickly racked up large debts—debts they were obligated to settle before they ever even thought about leaving the town.

            As for the actual living conditions in such towns, they were far from the idyllic neighborhoods many might have aspired to. Houses were built as close together as physically possible, so as to allow the greatest number of workers to reside there. Besides lacking privacy and being shabbily built, one could only hope a home in the neighborhood didn’t fall victim to a fire, or else the whole lot would go up in flames. Beyond that, company towns were also typically surrounded by fences or guards. This was allegedly for the workers’ protection. But in areas throughout the South, the truth was rather transparent: as free laborers and convict laborers were housed in the same areas, both groups fell victim to equally abhorrent treatment.

            Please, go and read up on Company Towns. They were never a good thing, and often a very, very bad thing.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        They do in Florida because, until a few years ago, they had complete control over the municipal government they operated in.

        Disney has never had such control over the land around Disneyland.