Two magical campaign victories would fuel a growing uprising

A long-overdue shift to populist action could help heal a divide-and-conquer politics

May 17, 2024

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progresss Report.

Over the past few years, we have spent a decent bit of time in this newsletter covering corrupt crank Clarence Thomas’s fascist tendencies, debt to Nazi-enthusiast billionaires, and connections to groups working to reverse a century of progress and maybe even democracy itself. The guy deserves every moment of scrutiny and then some, yet news tonight about his reactionary colleague Samuel Alito’s open embrace of election denialism and the Big Lie is a reminder that the problem is very much systemic.

Alito’s flagpole flew an upside-down American flag in the early days of 2021, when conspiracy theorists around the country used that as a silent protest and introduction to fellow fringe loons. Alito insists now that it was the work of his wife and a retort in a dispute with an anti-Trump neighbor, a lame non-excuse that indicates how little he seems to care about class and reality.

I’ll have far more on the Supreme Court and what can be done about it in an upcoming edition of Progress Report. Today’s dispatch is focused on some much more positive developments.

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Next time you visit Disneyland, try to take it easy on the costumed characters, because there’s a pretty decent chance that the people playing Mickey Mouse and Snow White are nursing an injury under all that recycled plastic, polyester, and lace.

Courtney Griffith, a 25-year-old parade performer, was hurt in an incident involving the cape of her princess costume. It took several years of physical therapy and pushing the company for Disney to agree to a worker’s compensation settlement, which made her one of the luckier ones.

“Most people that perform at Disneyland do have a permanent injury,” Griffith told me last week. “At a certain point, the magic starts to fade away and you're just left with not being able to pay my rent, permanent injuries, and management who doesn't value or respect you.”

For many people, working at Disneyland begins as a dream job, and for Griffith, the daughter of two former parade performers who met while working in the park, it was the only thing she ever really wanted to do. She still works there, as both a performer and a host, but even that loyalty to the company hasn’t discouraged her from supporting the union drive that went public last month.

In fact, Griffith’s commitment to her co-workers and family history — her mom had to hang up the mouse ears due to an ongoing injury — are part of what drove her to become a leader in a campaign culminates this week with a high-stakes election.

Between Wednesday and Friday, around 1700 workers from the Characters and Parades departments — suit actors, show performers, hosts, safety leads, and more — will decide whether to join Actors Equity, the 110-year-old union for live performers and stage managers.

There is an interesting dichotomy at play in this election. Workers have very legitimate gripes — customers have gotten more impatient and violent since the pandemic, the already low pay has been further eroded by inflation, and punishing schedules often leave people unemployed for months yet also make it very difficult to hold down a second job. Some employees live hours away for more affordable rent, while others just live in their cars.

And yet, talk to the average Disneyland worker and you’ll find that they really love their job. It takes a certain kind of person to want to work at Disneyland, especially in such public-facing roles, and even skeptical new hires tend to be quickly brought into the fold after undergoing the “Traditions” classes that precede starting work on site.

Adam Hefner, another character performer and organizer, said that it required a fair amount of effort to convince some coworkers that it wasn’t a transgression against Disney to advocate for themselves. After all, their contemporaries in Orlando have been unionized for years and Walt Disney World still drives a significant percentage of the company’s earnings, which reached $1.9 billion in the first quarter of 2024.

text — Photo by taylor gregory on Unsplash

In fact, other jobs at Disneyland are also unionized, and its parent mega-corporation works within collective bargaining agreements across many of its divisions. Yet this is the third attempt to unionize the Parades and Characters workers at Disneyland, and for as cutesy as that sounds, landslide success, which lead supporters are confident is afoot, would indicate an important development for the politics and perception of workers rights.

The Magic of Neutrality

This round of organizing began in earnest in the fall of 2022, and has been the case for so many campaigns, it was sparked by the company’s unilateral decision to drop Covid protections and implement strict new policies.

At Disneyland, it became impossible to take time off, performers couldn’t wear masks during up-close meet-and-greets with guests, and workers were restricted from signing family into the park at a time when a ticket prices surpassed four times the average hourly wage. What was once touted as a significant benefit was all but erased, which felt at the very least like a slap in the face.

Not all that long ago, disappointed and even outraged workers would have likely just found other jobs, allowing Disney to keep turnover rate at a rather brisk two or so years per employee. Post-pandemic, having watched similarly frustrated workers at other mega-corporations turn to organizing, those at Disneyland decided to pursue collective action. Now they’re on the verge of forcing the world’s biggest media company to listen to employees and come to a compromise.

The attendant shift in mentality both among wage-earning workers and corporate executives cannot be undersold. At a time when so many feel politically helpless, working class Americans with no prior training or even real inclination to do so are defiantly and successfully organizing unions through person-to-person persuasion and preaching a populism that was missing from the national discourse for decades. Just as unionizing seems increasingly desirable and less intimidating to workers in a broadening range of professions, it seems to be in some places eliciting more subdued reactions from resource-rich employers.

While Disney did not voluntarily recognize the union and instead opted to request an election, the “best” option available to employers under the current NLRB’s Cemex framework, workers at Disneyland tell me that the union-busting hasn’t been particularly extreme or threatening. The company has probably accepted the inevitable, which places it among the more enlightened corporations on this critical issue.

There’s an even bigger union election underway right now in Alabama, where Mercedes-Benz and Republican state officials have engaged in an overwhelming campaign of disinformation and intimidation.

Further History Awaits

After winning a historic election at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee last month, the United Auto Workers are at the finishing line of a months-long campaign to unionize a Mercedes factory in Tuscaloosa. The unit would include more than 4000 workers at the company’s biggest manufacturing plant in North America, in the deepest part of the South.

Like Disney, Mercedes’s facilities elsewhere — in this case Europe — are unionized, but the luxury carmaker is desperate to an organized workforce here in the United States. It has run through much of the classic union-busting playbook, including pulling workers into captive audience meetings during which they show anti-union videos and read written warnings.

Local TV has been blanketed with anti-union ads, powerful lawmakers such as Gov. Kay Ivey have actively opposed the campaign, and Mercedes has even enlisted the help of a pastor and Tuscaloosa councilman to rail against the UAW. The automaker also ousted its CEO and had the new one write a heartfelt letter to workers promising that he would make decisions in their best interests.

Polls have shown broad support for unionizing workers in Alabama, but this should nonetheless be a tighter election than last month’s blow-out in Tennessee. A second victory would signal a true sea change in the public’s willingness to confront a ruling class and turn to one another for solutions. The UAW already endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, but this isn’t about creating more Democratic voters. Instead, the utility of the union, beyond negotiating a better contract and protecting workers, is in forging the kind of social cohesion that isn’t threaded together by mutual outrage or fear.

🏛️ 😉 Supremely Tricky: The US Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered Louisiana to reimplement a Congressional map that had recently been blocked by a lower court for being an illegal racist gerrymander — against white people.

It only gets weirder from there.

Last year, a federal judge ordered Louisiana to draw a second Black-majority district, and after the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Republican lawmakers there begrudgingly complied. The map they authorized included a district that stretches across half of the state, which drew a lawsuit from other Republicans that was initially successful.

Then top GOP state officials and Black civic organizations — very odd bedfellows — asked the Supreme Court to override the lower court’s decision and bring back the second Black-majority district. The high court did just that with a 6-3 decision from which all three of its liberal justices dissented.

Huh?

If you’re confused by what seems to be a case out of Bizarro World, check out this smart explanation from reporter Chris Geidner, a one-time colleague of mine who runs the Law Dork newsletter.

🗳️ 🎉 Minnesota does it right: Lawmakers in the North Star State have formally approved the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, which restores many of the protections that have been eroded by the Supreme Court and lower courts over the past decade.

Most critically, it allows voters to sue over voter suppression policies, a right that was at least temporarily stolen from them by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals over the winter. It also ends the practice of prison gerrymandering and bans election-related deepfakes.

☀️📋 Small wins in Florida: Democracy activists in the Sunshine State were given a rare reason to smile this week, as a federal judge blocked a provision in SB 7050 intended to chill voter registration drives by non-partisan organizations.

The provision banned noncitizens — here legally or otherwise — from helping to register new voters. With a $50,000 fine for every infraction, many organizations have curtailed their voter registration efforts, fearful that some well-meaning volunteers would bankrupt them. Other provisions of the law, with equally preposterous penalties, are still being litigated.

Elsewhere in Florida, the long saga of the 2018 voting rights amendment took a bit of an unexpected turn this week.

The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which spearheaded the successful constitutional amendment to restore former felons’ voting rights, is dropping its lawsuit against the state over its refusal to implement the policy. In exchange, the Florida Department of State has pledged to create a legitimate process that would allow people who have paid their debts to society to rejoin the democratic process.

It’s probably safe to presume that the state won’t be considering the easiest way to restore people’s rights: simply repeal a 2019 law that required former felons to pay back all of the myriad fines and fees that they accrued while incarcerated. Florida has no central database that tracks these penalties, and every county has its own way of handling fining and collecting.

They really should have gotten this promise in writing.

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