Walt Disney heir Abigail Disney recently criticized the company founded by her great uncle.On Twitter, she called out the company for temporarily stopping pay to half of its workforce, while maintaining its bonus payouts for executives. This comes in the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic's massive impact on the company, which includes a park shutdown and a production suspention on all TV shows and films.
She pointed out the Disney corporation is maintaining its stock dividend for shareholders. While she acknowledged stock dividends can be good supplemental income for the middle class, she made clear that 80% of payouts go to the wealthiest 10% of shareholders. This dividend payout ($1.5 billion) would be enough to pay the company's frontline workers for 3 months.
Disney went into detail about the executive bonus schemes, using Bob Chapek as an example. Chapek stands to earn $9 million as part of his bonus for 2020, over 170 times the median salary of a Disney employee (about $52,000). That $52,000 is even more than the pay of frontline workers in the parks, who only recently had their pay bumped to $15/hour. If a frontline worker works 40 hours a week (which, as the Disney heir pointed out, isn't a given, since the company shaves hours so the workers won't be considered full time) and works 52 weeks a year (also not a given), they earn $31,200 a year. This is barely 3/5 of that median pay, and frontline workers are the ones most affected by the current shutdown.
She lambasted Chapek over this, writing, "If you have a shred of empathy in your body, if you care even a little about your employees... none of this compensation bullshit is possible." She also stated that, while the challenges to the company in the current crisis "were existential," its executives could not "continue pillaging and rampaging."
While she acknowledged that she has no formal role at the company, Abigail Disney stated that she had a responsibility as the bearer of its founder's name and that she had "a conscience which makes it very difficult for me to sit by when I see abuses taking place with that name attached to them." She ended the thread by saying that the Walt Disney Company had "an opportunity to change" by "[paying] the people who make the magic happen with respect and dignity they have more than earned."