Labor union

Some 14,000 cast members at Disneyland in California voted by an overwhelming 99 percent to authorize a strike on Monday; however, a coalition of union members reached a tentative agreement with Disneyland Tuesday, mainly revolving around wage increases. The coalition, titled Disney Workers Rising, will open a vote on the agreement at Disneyland for employees on July 29. According to Disney, there are more than 35,000 cast members (what they call their employees) who work at Disneyland in Orange County, California. The terms of the agreement have yet to be disclosed, but if Disney agreed to raise wages by twenty-five cents an hour — which certain employees have hypothesized could happen, though it will likely be by much more — that would cost them more than $18 million per year.

Few developments have more cheered progressive activists than the perceived resurgence of labor unions. This has been sparked by largely symbolic efforts to unionize in places such as Starbucks and Amazon, as well as more sizable wins by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and United Auto Workers, the country’s most important private labor union. In 2022 strike activity more than doubled from the previous year. Yet ultimately these wins may turn out to be largely Pyrrhic.

It is only fitting that the low point of the American labor movement occurred in 2009, the Year of the Rat. The Great Recession may have started with Wall Street speculation in the housing market, but your average American had most likely never heard of Henry Lehman or his siblings until the day Dick Fuld drove the 150-year-old bank bearing their name into the ditch. But General Motors, Chrysler? Cars, even more than Hollywood, jazz and the semi-automatic rifle, are the quintessential American business. How could those get driven into the ground? As soon as freshly evicted homeowners finished packing the remains of their subprime split-levels into the backseats of their battered Tahoes, they went looking for culprits. They settled on the United Auto Workers.