.
.
.
I’m sure you know that right now, signatures are being collected for a November Anaheim initiative mandating a $15 an hour living wage to be paid by resort companies enjoying huge Anaheim taxpayer subsidies (basically Disney, Wincome and possibly Gardenwalk.)
Meanwhile Disney and its allies, terrified of having to pay their loyal workers a fair wage, have been churning out desperate, shrill propaganda warning ad nauseam that the measure will cost the city over 4,000 jobs.
Not only is this claim untrue, but it’s the opposite of the truth – a living wage for thousands of working class Anaheim residents will have a ripple effect on the local economy leading to more employment opportunities as resort workers are freed up to spend more of their money.
How’d Disney’s propagandists come up with this ridiculous “job killer” claim? Out of what dark place did they pull it? Thankfully, they included a footnote:
Council reports from 2013 and 2016. Really.
Those are very familiar dates, in 2013 and 2016, for historians of the Anaheim kleptocracy.
No, Disney and Wincome bean-counters did not sit down and determine that they’ll be forced to lay off 4,000 of their currently underpaid staff or replace them with automation rather than pay them $15 an hour. May 2013 was the time of the original $158 million “GardenWalk Giveaway,” and July 2016 was the time of the approximately $700 million TOT giveaway to Disney and Hong Kong-based Wincome Group to build three “four-diamond” hotels.
And “over 4,000” is the total of new jobs that were promised with the building of these four subsidized hotels. So what the resort propagandists are threatening is that, if Wincome, Disney, and the Gardenwalk hotel are forced to pay a living wage, they’ll just refuse to build those hotels.
First of all, this implied threat is preposterous, when you compute how profitable these hotels will be at current room rates – $350 to $450 a room at occupancy rates of 88% bringing Disney’s proposed 260-room hotel to about $51 million annual profit, which they’re saying they’ll forfeit rather than spend about $1 million to pay their employees fairly, the same that the Hilton and Sheraton pay their empoyees? It makes no sense that they’d even consider that, and it’s grotesque that they’d threaten it.
Secondly, it’s good for us all to note that even as they cry “Job Killer Initiative,” these are not 4,000 EXISTING jobs that they’re threatening to slash, but future possible jobs that they’re threatening to not create. (This is richly ironic coming from the same folks who claim that they’re not getting taxpayer “giveaways” because the hundreds of millions in TOT taxes that they’ve arranged to have returned to them is not money that exists yet.)
Finally, even if these three behemoths did get cold feet because their projected profits are not QUITE so huge as they had hoped, someone else would certainly build hotels there. AND not demand taxpayer subsidies from you, but happily pay their TOT tax supporting Anaheim’s infrastructure and services that they and all of us depend on.
We could go on all day debunking the lies on this propaganda website, but there’s better use of our time. What you, Anaheim voter, need to know before you sign to get this initiative on the ballot (signatures due May 1) and then vote on it in November, is: Is this fair and just, and will it work?
You need to hold two contrasting ideas in your head: Disney’s immensely creative theme parks, movies and hotels bring joy to nearly everybody; and meanwhile their business (unlike during Walt’s time) is being run by some of the greediest, most irresponsible people around.
I’ll give you just one amazing fact right now: when you average in all big and small businesses, the typical CEO earns 5 times more than the lowest paid worker; when you get to the largest, S&P 500 companies, the typical CEO earns 335 times more than the lowest paid worker. Disney’s CEO Bob Iger sets a record, pulling in a gargantuan 9000 times his lowest paid worker.
There should be no doubt that Disney, with its perpetually hiked ticket prices, billions of profits, political maneuverings and taxpayer subsidies, can easily afford to pay its workers the same as their Anaheim resort district neighbors the Hilton, Sheraton and Marriot.
We want to get this out now, though we’ll add to it. Because as they say, “A lie gets halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on.” And we’re still getting our boots on here. But in case you missed these huge stories from the past half a year, you should really check them out. And then sign and vote yes on our Living Wage Initiative:
- Is Disney Paying its Fair Share in Anaheim?
- And the sequel to that.
- Down and out in Disneyland: Workers in Poverty
- Register: Disney Resort Workers Struggle to Pay for Food, Rent.
- Weekly: Disney Workers are the True Magic-Makers, but Survey Shows Many Toil in Poverty.
- “Working for the Mouse” Survey.
- and The Homeless Disney Worker Who Died Living in Her Car.
At Council tonight (besides my version of “The Bare Necessities”) I summarized this “4,000 lost jobs = a threat to not build 4 subsidized hotels = bullshit” thesis. Jill Kanzler, the Cruella DeVille I mean the well-paid spokeswoman for SOAR (“Save Our Anaheim Resorts”) spoke a little after me.
I doubt she listened or took me seriously, but I had just pre-butted her speech, as she spoke with woeful caring heaving bosom about the 4,000 jobs that wouldn’t be materializing for deserving Anaheimers if they made the mistake of passing Living Wage.
I caught her on her way out (on her way to her Jaguar with police escort.) She was already in a bad mood from arguing with a union leader on the way out. I asked her “Jill, are you really saying that the four subsidized hotels might not get built?” She snapped out her answer, “Not if THIS SHIT goes through, they might not!”
So that IS their threat, and it IS just a threat.
“Jill, are you really saying that the four subsidized hotels might not get built?”
As an Anaheim resident I can say that doesn’t bother me at all. They never should have been subsidized in the first place.
Yup, either way we win – to a degree – if this initiative passes.
Agreed. Make it $50hr. Kill those contracts for good.
What these people fail to comprehend is when you allow government to interfere in the business decisions of a private company, for better **or worse** you allow government to interfere in the business decisions of a private company.
Solution? Don’t allow government to interfere in the business decisions of a private company.
Yeah, and I’m not weeping any tears for the unions, either, who were perfectly happy selling future generations down the river for their own labor agreements.
The subsidies violate the core argument of ‘Wealth of Nations’ – that government should not try to impose its hand to help certain industries, but should withdraw and let them work things out for themselves. However, once the government violates the principles, how to restore the balance?
Adam Smith burnt his treatise on law, as he couldn’t find an appropriate answer. Perhaps democracy presents the most viable one: when the government intrudes into the free market, the people may intrude into the beneficiaries of that intrusion to restore the balance.
Or, put another way, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” That sounds almost biblical…
I propose formation of a new group – SOARLY – ‘Save our Anaheim Residents Like Yeweinishet” (“Weini” Mesfin), the Disney janitor who died in her car in 2016.
Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, may make over $400m in income this year. He could bear the entire cost by a simple reduction in salary, and still pull in a rather respectable income of a few hundred million/year. In practice, the Anaheim subsidies to the resort district have INCREASED his compensation package – why shouldn’t he pay folks who work there enough to live?
The OCRegister pointed out that Weini probably wouldn’t want her name to be drawn into the public eye; she probably also wouldn’t have wanted to decompose for 20 days in her car before she was discovered in a parking garage. But dead employees ought to trump possible jobs, and calling attention at every opportunity to the compensation packages of Disney execs will help drive that home (as well as call into question SOAR’s prioririties – what small businessman in Anaheim really believes he needs to make a contribution to those folk’s salaries?).
Where did Vern get his economics degree?
Oh, you can be sure that I worked on the economic parts of this post with people who do have economics degrees, but asked not to be named.
Why, you got any rebuttal or corrections?
Where did Jill Kanzler and Kris Murray get their economic degrees? How about Cunningham? He can’t even be a consistent ideologue when a few crumbs are swept off the table in his direction.
“Disney’s immensely creative theme parks, movies and hotels bring joy to nearly everybody”
Everything they touch turns to bowdlerism, conventionalism, creative dilution, consumption. Their Pixar characters always spout the same PC slogans and comfortable nostrums. Hell, they even look the same. The cynicism behind their commercialism masked as “creativity” ought not to be underestimated. It’s been going on for a long. long time.
Comrade, I am writing for the masses. Not everybody is as *sniff* sophisticated as us.
I did write “nearly” everybody. That seems to be true.
Yeah, well I’m sick of the “they all must hate Disney” rhetoric, and all the unbalanced “we love Disney, but…” thrown out because someone thinks it’s unAmerican (or something) to see the Disney conglomerate for what it is: a menace to culture.
And old Walt led the corporate parade with the schmalzification of history and literature, the corporate appropriation of loads of free public domain legends, and worst of all, the debasement of stories and characters bought and spoiled .
Well the way I figure it is, the louder Soar(Swindling Our Anaheim Residents) and the Mouse howl, the more sure I am that I am doing the right thing. Thank you for another fine article Vern.
I’ll discuss later my issues with the petition itself. But what caught my attention Tuesday was this;
Jill Kanzler represented her 10,000 “members” as “residents and advocates” but failed to say residents of WHERE. Obviously, everyone is a resident of somewhere. But the “membership” process for SOAR is simply to submit your email address to their website for more info, and BINGO, you are suddenly a “member” for life, your numbers used to claim blanket agreement with everything SOAR will ever do, say, or claim. But there is no way to determine how a first and last name combined with an email address could be Anaheim residents. And SOAR has been claiming 10,000 members since they began in 2007. You would think that if their message resonated with the public they would have growing numbers. Instead, they collected the magical number of emails from goodness knows where and claim the mailing list as a membership that hasn’t changed in 10 years.
Dr. Moreno asked Kanzler where those members came from, if they were “dues paying”? Kanzler allowed a momentary look of utter disdain to flick across her face before answering, “No you don’t pay dues, they’re just members because they support the Resort District.” When asked how that is defined, she said, “They signed up and said, ‘I support the Resort District and I think this is the right thing to do.” Now look at their website, where it says “JOIN SOAR” and under it is “Sign Up To Receive Updates From SOAR.” Where is the public told that by signing up for info they have granted unlimited approval for anything SOAR wants to claim in their names for life? http://soaranaheim.com
That has ALWAYS bothered me, and I am tired of their spokespeople misrepresenting where they get members and what membership means. But then I am also tired of hearing how “5% of the City generates 50% of tax revenues” even after staff has repeatedly debunked those numbers, it is not 50% even as a GROSS total and when we consider the restricted funds of bonds to cover the previous subsidies, we see less than A QUARTER of funding coming from the Resort. This is WITHOUT consideration for the hidden cost of hosting the Happiest Place on Earth, like the impacts of low wage labor in our neighborhoods and the cost to taxpayers of social service programs to underwrite the difference between what a human being needs to survive and what they get in a paycheck.
Frankly, a fourth of the General Fund should be something worth bragging about, IF it meant that Anaheim had one fourth more discretionary income to work with than cities of similar size and income demographics. But Anaheim runs neck and neck with the General Fund of SANTA ANA, meaning something is depressing our sales and property tax so badly we fall behind Santa Ana in those areas and only make up the difference with tourism to bring us to Santa Ana levels! That is embarrassing.
The other claim that caught my attention was Kanzler saying “these aren’t meant to be–to provide for families–they’re meant to be entry-level and start and continue to grow up the scale.” But in the 1990s, when Brandman and Associates did the EIR for the Resort, they documented that while theme park workers were largely PT seasonal students living at home, they KNEW the hotel workers were primary wage earners, and not making enough even back then! Disney was supposed to build 500 affordable housing units as mitigation for their impacts to workforce housing, but the City somehow let them off the hook with a last minute (undisclosed) swap to put $5MM in PUBLIC FUNDS from the bonds we repay from the General Fund into neighborhood improvements (improving the view from the back windows of the Disney hotel) and NOT A SINGLE HOUSING UNIT WAS CREATED. Thank the Democratic Mayor at the time for that one. So while Disney and their spokespeople want to claim the jobs are not supposed to support primary wage earners, their own enviro docs drafted by their own friendly neighborhood schlock-house recorded that they employed FT primary wage-earners, and would increase the number of primary wage earners, and they just rolled right over it.
Other than that I have no opinion. Well actually I do but we will circle back to it, because despite all this I am not signing the petition. That is for another time.
I would greatly appreciate hearing your reasons for not signing the petition – preferably sooner, rather than later. You’ve shown solid reasoning about SOAR, and offered experience here that no newcomer to the OC could otherwise obtain: you may sway more than one bystander with your views.
For me, having read the wording of the ballot initiative, I see a few points that make me pause. While I strongly support the principle – no entity or person should ever receive a subsidy from the government without also bearing additional responsibilities beyond those typical of ordinary persons (or companies) – to do anything else is for the government to pick winners and losers and violate the whole premise of a free market. But I am not sure this initiative resolves that balance properly, and would welcome critical commentary.
It may be on purpose that Cynthia is not speaking too critically about it right here and right now, as the web is crawling with anti-initiative propaganda already, and this piece is the David to Disney’s Goliath.
This is the time that Kleptocrats get to pretend to be Conservatives, and real Conservatives have qualms. It really goes against the grain for real conservatives to let the public/government dictate business policies; they see it as a bad precedent.
Yes, that sums it up. The Kleptocracy® has given us the tax kickbacks and subsidies; an opportunity to strike back is appealing on the surface but then makes one complicit in the union’s highly cynical behavior and of accepting more mercantilism.
On the other hand. You guys are painting all unions with one broad brush of corruption. The unions involved here are NOT the building trades and teamsters who pushed for all the giveaways (and toll lanes, and Poseidon, etc etc). In fact the Teamsters refused to be involved in this initiative, not wanting to get on Disney’s bad side.
No, Vern.
These are the unions that didn’t get their cut.
These are the unions representing hotel workers, Ryan. I don’t think that “getting their cut” applies.
David: If certain union(s) + corporation(s) cooperated to contrive subsidies, the remedy ought to involve distributing at least some portion of the benefits to other persons who were outside of the original collusion.
Failure to ‘strike back’ rewards the initial beneficiaries of mercantilism – encouraging them to do it again (except this time, from a position of greater wealth and power than they enjoyed before reaping the fruits). If that persists, mercantilism follows by fiat – the side opposing ‘mercantilism’ becomes a servant of the mercantilists, defending their gains.
Once again, the principle is quite simple: “to those who have received much, much will be required of them.”
Vern: Fair enough. SOAR may well read things here; Cynthia has no reason to offer them the benefit of the gray matter she used to think this thing through and reach her reservations, when they have their own ‘members’ to poll. Still, there’s quite a few clocks ticking…
Sorry I missed the homeless meeting last Monday, I’d love to hear the concerns and join the well-thought through efforts of responsible adults trying to address serious problems in this community.
There’s always this Monday – 7pm, since it’s not an “Anaheim Council week.”
i know this is an older post, but after reading Cynthia’s well written comment, I couldn’t believe that all it takes to “join SOAR” is an email…well I went ahead and tried it out.
Went to their website and filled out the form with the asterisk.
First name: F*ck
Last name : you
email : SOARandDisneycansuckmyd*ck@gmail.com
I got a “thank you” and “you will receive email updates” thing soon after.
They don’t verify if the emails are even real!
Martin Luther King Jr said he had a dream. Yeah, I have a dream too, the day SOAR and idiots like Lucille Kring finally go to H E double hockey sticks.
For sure I am voting for the ballot measure to raise the wages.
Disney has been nothing but a cancer in Anaheim. We were better off growing oranges and grapes. At least everyone had a home and a wage back then.
Today’s society sickens me.
I love Anaheim. I grew up here. I even volunteered at some of the historical places we have here and enjoyed teaching others about their inherited history that brought Anaheim into being. I’ve been a substitute teacher at a K-6 district as well, where I saw some of the poorest kids in Anaheim and that school lunch was probably their only meal.
Yet everyone gets their panties in a bunch when hardworking cast members want to raise the wages to $15?
Jesus.
That election is not till November though, I hope you’re planning to come out and vote tomorrow if you haven’t. Some things on this ballot are very important. If I have to really bring it down to two for an Anaheim voter: No on the recall, and MURDOCK for DA.
BTW I love the Blazing Saddles reference. Well done.