Let it go, Disney: Elsa wants a union

Gawrsh! After a historic year in labor organizing, Goofy wants a union.

On Feb. 13, Disneyland employees who don costumes and perform as our children’s favorite characters announced their intent to organize a union. Under the mantle “Magic United,” the cast members stated that in just three days, 30 percent of the 1,700 employees in the characters and parades departments have signed union authorization cards, declaring their intent to join the Actor’s Equity Association. The law requires just over 50 percent support for union recognition.

In California, where the annual income needed to purchase a home has risen to $220,000, union membership has become one of the bare necessities. Why wish upon a star for better wages and workplace respect when, together with your coworkers, you can demand it?

Although Magic United has the cards needed to file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board, it wants to wait until it reaches 60 percent support. Why the delay? Because labor law is not robust enough to prevent employers from busting unions.

Indeed, workers at Starbucks and Amazon have had to endure grueling anti-union campaigns that have resulted in retaliatory acts, including terminations. Magic United wants to make sure it has a buffer to account for support it will lose in the event Disney decides to hire expensive “union avoidance” consultants, and bully workers into voting no.

Companies like Microsoft have opted for a more reasonable, less costly approach to unionization: union neutrality. Neutrality agreements make it easier for workers to form unions. Such an agreement would insulate Mickey and Minnie from employer intimidation and intervention during their campaign to unionize.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employers literally brought in hired guns, like the Pinkertons, to defeat unionization campaigns by steelworkers and coal miners seeking better pay and working conditions. In the 1930s, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, in part to ensure workers can organize a union free from management retaliation and intimidation. The NLRA, however, has not prevented employers from feeding workers spoonfuls of propaganda.

For instance, a recent study by Kate Brofenbrenner from Cornell University’s School of Industrial Relations found that, during organizing drives, “85 percent of employers forced workers to attend mandatory captive audience meetings,” and “71 percent of employers had supervisors regularly talk with workers one-on-one about the campaign.” These meetings give employers the opportunity to browbeat, cajole or manipulate workers into voting against unionization. 

According to a 2022 memorandum issued by the NLRB’s general counsel, mandatory captive-audience meetings “inherently involve an unlawful threat that employees will be disciplined or suffer other reprisals if they exercise their protected right not to listen to such speech.”

I witnessed such union-busting tactics firsthand as a union organizer over 20 years ago. During a campaign to organize workers at a hospital in Los Angeles County, vocal union supporters had their shifts abruptly changed or work assignments downgraded. Management also disseminated misinformation through meetings and encouraged acts of intimidation against union supporters — threats in the mail, jeers from coworkers — causing a climate of fear to pervade the hospital.

The workers lost their union election. We subsequently gathered witness accounts and filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. Our legal efforts failed, but I’m not sure the result would have changed even if we had succeeded. The problem with the NLRA is that, because the remedies for employer misconduct are often inadequate, and the process so slow, the damage an employer can inflict upon an organizing campaign can rarely be undone.

In contrast, under a neutrality agreement, management agrees not to force workers to watch anti-union videos in captive-audience meetings, punish workers for expressing pro-union views or interrogate individual workers regarding how they plan to vote in a unionization election. And when you remove management’s ability to place its thumb on the scale, workers have a fair chance at workplace democracy.

In the early 2000s, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) devised a corporate-campaign strategy against one of California’s largest health care corporations, Tenet. This resulted in a neutrality agreement. In exchange for labor peace, Tenet agreed not to intimidate its employees during organizing campaigns. We subsequently organized thousands of health care workers in California in under two years, all of whom won free family healthcare and guaranteed raises shortly after unionizing.

In contrast to the toxic work environment that results from an employer’s decision to declare war on the union, a neutrality agreement provides for a more civil, less costly approach, and helps foster a collaborative relationship between workers and management during contract negotiations.

To be sure, right-leaning organizations such as the National Right to Work Foundation and some politicians argue that neutrality agreements “impose a gag order” on management, robbing poor unfortunate souls of their voice. Such arguments, however, ignore the reality of workplace power dynamics. As a worker, you may be willing to listen to a scrappy-looking union organizer who knocks at your door or accosts you in the breakroom. But when your boss — the person who signs your paycheck, sets your schedule and advocates for (or prevents) your promotion — says a union is a bad idea, it’s hard to disagree.

Notably, Disney is not venturing into the unknown here. The performers at Disney World in Florida who do the same work as their Anaheim counterparts have been in a union since 1990.

Disneyland has a choice. It can fight unionization, a move even Starbucks has recently rethought. Or it could take advice from Anna of Arendelle, and do the next right thing — let the workers decide.

Jonah J. Lalas, a former union organizer, is a partner at labor law firm Rothner, Segall and Greenstone in Pasadena, Calif. He represents the union for Disneyland’s food service workers, Workers United Local 50.