Abigail Disney Condemns Walt Disney Company’s Labor Practices In Sundance Doc

Watch Disney and Hughes introduce their film:

As Disney investigated, she developed a critique of the company’s practices, whereby executives and shareholders get rich at the expense of rank-and-file workers. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t endear her to former CEO Bob Iger, whom she has called “a good manager in the Ebenezer Scrooge sense.” She exchanged a few emails with him, “[a]nd after my second email, it was silence, and it’s been silence ever since.”

As for his replacement Bob Chapek:

[He] was the guy who presided over all of the changes at Disneyland and Disney World that we’re talking about in this film — dynamic scheduling, a euphemism for jerking them around so they can’t get a second job and they never make 40 hours a week and they don’t qualify for health care. … So I don’t really have very optimistic expectations [about Chapek’s tenure as CEO]. If anything, it’ll probably get worse.

To the filmmaker, the Walt Disney Company symbolizes a broader malaise in American capitalism. “I really do want regular American people, voters, to see [the documentary]. I want them to see it and think about it when they go to the polls. And I want them to think about it when they get approached about organizing for a union.”

Submarine is repping the film at Sundance. Read more about it here. (Note that the festival’s site describes Disney as a descendant of Walt Disney, which is slightly misleading: she is the granddaughter of his brother Roy O. and daughter of Roy E. Disney, a longtime executive at the company who went on to lead a successful shareholder revolt.)