A corporation does not have morals—it has a bottom line. Disney’s lawsuit against Florida is more about being able to reap profits while underpaying workers than it is about protecting LGBTQ communities.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis is eager to cast himself as the new and improved Donald Trump. He has waged a relentless war against what he calls “woke ideology” by attacking the rights of vulnerable minorities to teach and learn history, to read literature, and to get life-saving medical care such as gender-affirming treatment and reproductive health care. Now, his attack on Florida’s largest corporation is being cast in the same vein of “good versus evil.”

Except that the DeSantis-Disney war ought really to be viewed as an opportunity to call Republicans out on their slavish devotion to Big Business and dare them to follow through with stripping not just the Disney corporation, but all money-hungry companies of their dependence on public financing. Both DeSantis and Disney are predatory, albeit in different ways.

Disney, a company that has deep cultural sway over Americans for being a purveyor of “magic” and “happiness,” has enjoyed a very special and extremely unusual arrangement in Orlando, Florida, where its Walt Disney World Resort occupies tens of thousands of acres named the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Since 1967, the state of Florida has allowed the corporation to govern the area and even to issue tax bonds to residents in order to pay for municipal services while being exempt from certain regulations and taxes.

Rather than viewing Disney World as “the happiest place on earth,” Sophie Weiner, writing in Popular Mechanics in 2018, explained that, “Disney World is what it looks like if you give a corporation full control over an area of land as big as San Francisco. It’s worked out great for the company, which counts on the park for 14 percent of its $2 billion yearly earnings.” Further, in 2021, the state of Florida gifted the company a massive $580 million tax break in exchange for moving about 2,000 jobs from its California locations to Florida.

But in March 2022 Disney took a stand against the Parental Rights in Education Law, which has been dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” act, prompting DeSantis’s ire. A month later Florida’s Republican legislature dissolved Disney’s special status in a law that is to take effect on June 1, 2023. DeSantis explained the move saying, “I’m just not comfortable having that type of agenda get special treatment in my state.” In other words, Disney’s special corporate arrangement would not be tolerated if it challenged his homophobia.

Except that Disney had to be pushed hard into taking such a moral stand. For weeks after the bill was announced the company was perfectly content enjoying the largesse of Florida even as activists were demanding it speak out against a law prohibiting teachings that touch on gender identity and sexual orientation to kids in kindergarten through third grade. Disney’s own workers protested their employer’s lack of courage. The hashtag #BoycottDisney began trending. The company eventually, reluctantly, reacted by suspending all its political donations in the state of Florida to both parties—not exactly the most principled stand.

To his credit, Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek also made public statements against the bill and offered a $5 million donation to the Human Rights Campaign (which the group rejected).

But earlier this year Florida, realizing that dissolving Disney’s tax status would end up dumping a billion-dollar bond debt onto the public, quickly scrambled to restore the special district while muzzling Disney. A new law will allow the governor to appoint leadership positions of Reedy Creek Improvement District instead of allowing Disney to do so.

Representative Anna Eskamani, a progressive Democrat in the state legislature, told the Hollywood Reporter, “The inner workings [of the special district] stay the same. The only difference is Disney won’t challenge the governor on anything anymore.” The company was initially happy and Disney World’s head Jeff Vahle said his company was “ready to work within this new framework.”

Testing this new arrangement DeSantis has revved up his culture war, approving a rule change to expand the Don’t Say Gay bill to all grades and sending a message to LGBTQ youth that their lives don’t matter. But the new board that he appointed to govern Disney’s special district voted to nullify a company plan to expand and develop the area. It was only then that Disney filed a lawsuit against DeSantis claiming he violated their first amendment rights over the homophobic law.

Every step of the way Disney was happy to suck up all the tax perks and financial autonomy it could get away with, regardless of whom its host was harming. Only when its financial status was threatened has it claimed to be on the side of LGBTQ communities.

Aside from Eskamani, few Democrats have called Disney out for its hypocrisy and for reaping special financial perks, instead supporting the corporation for being a job creator. Democratic Congressional representative Darren Soto chastised DeSantis, saying, “It’d be nice if he stopped attacking Central Florida’s top employer.” He added, “We’re talking about trying to get [Disney] to invest more money to create more jobs. And this is not helpful to those efforts.”

Soto’s words suggest that he sees Disney performing a massive favor to the state by operating its resort and parks there instead of the other way around. But the sort of jobs that Disney creates is precisely what has fueled deep income inequality in the U.S. Its presence in Florida has meant thousands of poorly paid jobs that keep Floridians in a hand-to-mouth existence, unable to cope with the rising cost of living. Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political science professor, told USA Today, “Yes, we have a lot of jobs. But they don’t pay very much. And we seem to have lost ground over time, especially when it comes to housing costs.”

One Disney worker told the Guardian, “We’re grossly, grossly underpaid for the hours that we work,” and that “[a] lot of Disney workers are barely squeaking by. You have workers with families sleeping in their car.”

Disney heiress Abigail Disney, who is an outspoken progressive, even made a documentary about the poor treatment of Disneyland workers in Anaheim, California, where the company also enjoys special tax benefits in exchange for creating jobs and where it was granted an exception to a voter-passed minimum wage increase. Just as in Florida, Disney’s California jobs are worth about as little as the taxes the company pays to the state.

In addition to constantly being granted exemptions for taxes and regulations, corporations like Disney enjoy a mythical status in the U.S. for being so massively profitable that their dollar signs obscure capitalism’s ugly underbelly.

Disney should not have control over land, resources, tax regulations, or wages. And lawmakers should not be allowed to trample over the rights of minorities. It’s not difficult to oppose both Disney’s power grab and DeSantis’s dangerous culture wars. Indeed, both positions are fully consistent with progressive ideals of protecting and furthering the rights of human beings.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:  Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Claiming to protect children, Republicans are going after libraries and librarians instead of the police, gun manufacturers, and actual child sexual abusers.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Missouri Republicans in early April voted to cut all public funding for libraries as part of their state budget proposal.

Leading the move was Cody Smith, a top Republican lawmaker and chair of the state’s budget committee, who made no attempt to hide the fact that he was retaliating against librarians because they dared to join the ACLU in suing the state over a Republican-led book ban. Smith said, “I don’t think we should subsidize the attempts to overturn laws that we also created,” even though the ACLU is entirely funding the lawsuit.

Indeed, Republicans forced Missouri’s librarians into suing their state in what appears to be yet another flashpoint in the GOP’s increasingly desperate culture wars. In 2022 the GOP passed SB 775, criminalizing librarians for providing “sexually explicit” material to minors. They face a $2,000 fine or up to a year in jail if found in violation of the bizarre law.

Thankfully, the state Senate Appropriations Committee moved quickly to restore public library funding, with Senate Republican Lincoln Hough admitting, “I think it was kind of a punitive cut that the House made.”

But the threat still remains after Missouri’s Republican State Secretary Jay Ashcroft pushed through an administrative rule that threatens funding if libraries violate the book ban. He did so in an explicitly undemocratic manner, saying, “I have to figure out how to do this, because by rule I can get it done much more quickly than if I wait on the legislature.”

“Defund the Library” could be the GOP’s new slogan, succinctly encompassing a free-market agenda to destroy public funding of institutions that enlighten and educate, all under the disingenuous banner of “protecting children.”

Missouri’s library debacle isn’t an isolated incident. Patmos Library in Jamestown, Michigan, lost its public funding last November after it refused to ban books that conservative voters deemed objectionable.

Louisiana Republicans are also advancing a state bill that threatens library funding over material deemed objectionable.

And Texas Republicans voted to cut library funding in retaliation for “drag queen story hour” readings, again claiming to do so in order to protect children from being exposed to men and gender-nonconforming individuals wearing makeup and dresses with pride.

A Vox analysis of libraries under attack explained the disturbing trend: “Usually, lawmakers start with book bans. If the bans aren’t as effective as they’d hope, they escalate to threatening to defund local libraries.”

U.S. libraries have long been institutions embodying freedom: the freedom to learn, and to do so anonymously, without regard to one’s financial status. When Congress rushed through the USA PATRIOT Act in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, librarians were among the first to counter the anti-democratic law, refusing to spy on their users for the government. They stood up to the federal government and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One Connecticut librarian named Peter Chase, who was bound by a government gag order over a requirement to turn over records, said, “As a librarian, I believe it is my duty and responsibility to speak out about any infringement to the intellectual freedom of library patrons.”

Libraries offer free use of computers and free internet service, an especially important service for people living in low-income neighborhoods, rural areas, and tribal communities. During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns forced children out of classrooms, many libraries created community hot spots and enabled Wi-Fi access in their parking lots so that kids without home internet could connect remotely with their classrooms.

Libraries do so much more than lend books. They offer passport services, help with job applications and school research, and provide low-cost or free spaces for community events. They promote local authors and participate in city-wide reading programs and book clubs. A 2021 California report on libraries in the state concluded that “Through digital labs, makerspaces, career centers and business resources, memory labs, public programs, community partnerships, and online resources, public libraries help communities explore, learn, connect, and have fun beyond their traditional ‘library’ brand.”

When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president in the 2016 election, he cited public funding of libraries as an example of democratic socialism in action, and libraries as “socialist institutions.”

Indeed, these socialist institutions are hugely popular. A Gallup poll of leisure activities conducted every 10 years found in 2019 that going to the library was “the most common cultural activity Americans engage in,” even more so than going to the movie theater. Libraries were far more popular among women than men, and low-income residents were far more likely to use their local library’s services than their higher-income neighbors.

In Michigan, where several libraries are dealing with book bans and where Patmos Library in Jamestown faced defunding, a March 2023 poll found broad support among the public, across party lines and political affiliations, to support libraries and the free dissemination of information.

These days it seems as though any public institution that actually helps and protects Americans is ripe for Republican-led destruction. It’s no wonder that conservatives are taking aim at this pillar of American democracy, deeming libraries “bastions of Marxism,” and “woke” purveyors of material that encourages racial justice and questions sexual orthodoxy. Not only have hundreds of books been banned across the country, but Republicans, like the ones in Missouri, are threatening librarians across the nation with fines and imprisonment. The Washington Post in a May 2023 analysis found that “[a]t least seven states have passed such laws in the last two years.”

Unlike police, who routinely kill and maim Americans, and who rightfully deserve to be targeted with defunding, and unlike gun manufacturers whose weapons continue to wreak constant violence and death across the country, librarians are the ones protecting and serving the public and its right to access information freely. But the GOP prefers to protect police and weapons makers while attacking librarians.

One New Jersey high school librarian named Martha Hickson was shocked to face unfounded accusations from a conservative of being “a pedophile, a pornographer, and a groomer of children,” during a heated debate over a book ban.

It turns out that not only do Republicans have a deep disdain for librarians, but also for children, the purported focus of their vociferous concerns.

Setting aside the GOP’s failure to protect children from mass shooters, Republican lawmakers have often shielded sexual predators. Pennsylvania Republicans refused to hold the church accountable for years of sexual abuse of children. Dozens of House Republicans refused to vote for the Respect for Child Survivors Act, a bill that would have protected child victims of sexual abuse. And Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert even praised a pastor friend and read his sermon on the House floor—a pastor who was a convicted child sexual abuser.

In fact, Daily Kos has a forum where readers submit news reports of “Republican Sexual Predators, Abusers, and Enablers.” The list is shockingly long.

Indeed, we should not be surprised to find out then that a Kansas City right-wing activist named Ryan Utterback, who pushed for Missouri’s book ban on the basis of protecting kids from LGBT-themed books, turned out to be an accused sexual predator. Utterback faces a felony charge of second-degree child sexual molestation.

In the battle over who really protects our children—librarians or Republicans—librarians are the ones who belong in our good books.

 

A militant labor strike by workers at 10 UC campuses comes after the state university system failed to offer compensation commensurate to the cost of living in California.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Nearly 50,000 academic workers at the University of California launched a historic strike on November 14 after contract negotiations with their employer failed. Postdoctoral scholars, researchers, trainees, fellows, graduate student instructors, readers, and tutors, who are from 10 UC campuses across the state and are unionized with United Auto Workers, walked out of their jobs.
Such workers are not traditionally associated with militant labor actions as intellectual work has historically been well-compensated in the United States. But, as universities have increasingly adopted corporate models of operation, the same sort of delineation in pay seen in other industries has taken hold in academia, with administrative executives earning top dollar while rank-and-file workers have seen their wages shrink relative to inflation. At the top of workers’ list of demands is better pay, one that is tied to the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing.
“What the UC is proposing in terms of… small percent increases in annual salary, essentially that results in a net loss” to workers, says Joyce Chan, a postdoctoral scholar in neurosciences at UC San Diego. Chan, who serves on the bargaining team for UAW 5810, is referring to the fact that California is one of the most expensive states to live in. She says, “our proposals are not only realistic, but we feel they are necessary.”
The university’s bargaining position can be boiled down to an expectation that its core academic workers simply have to accept a life of hardship. UC Provost Michael Brown, in a letter responding to the union’s demand, wrote, “Tying compensation directly to housing costs… could have overwhelming financial impacts on the University.”
But Chan counters that “30 to 80 percent of our income goes toward making rent alone.” Indeed, Brown did not dispute the fact that rent consumes too much of a graduate student’s paycheck. He only countered that it would be too hard for the university to do anything about it. In other words, if workers cannot afford to live, that’s their problem.
According to FairUCNow.org, a website set up by the UAW unions involved in the UC contract negotiations, academic workers “do the majority of teaching and research at UC, yet UC is refusing to offer us a fair share of the record-setting grant and state funding that our labor brings in.”
Chan points out that “our working conditions are our student’s learning conditions”—a logic familiar to one adopted by unionized school teachers in K-12 public schools. “If the UC meets our demands for fair compensation, we would be far more able to focus on the teaching, on the research, on everything that makes the University of California great,” she adds.
Brittany Drake, a PhD candidate at UCLA, tweeted in support of the strike, saying, “I do not doubt that many brilliant students research, careers, and health are being compromised due to the added financial stress, and hope that they will receive the support they deserve rather than admonishment.” She points out how, during her first two years in graduate school, she slept on friends’ couches, in her office, and even in her car. University administrators “admonished” her for spending nights in her office, but, she said, “No one asked if I was okay or needed help.”
Union members say the university can indeed afford to pay its academic workers more. “As California’s biggest [public] employer, the UC has a $46 billion annual budget,” says Chan, adding that “the [UAW] proposals for graduate workers would end up being less than 3 percent of the UC budget.” That academic workers cannot afford rent on their salaries is tantamount to them paying UC to work, instead of the other way around. In other words, it’s stolen labor.
“We have the right to demand better pay and better working conditions, and also to be able to demand things and to be heard,” says Chan. “We’re united and we’re ready to hold them accountable.”
In addition to sending a message to the university that workers demand better than what is being offered, the strike is also alerting the entire university community to the long-standing plight of graduate students and postdoctoral workers. The sight of thousands of UAW members rallying and picketing at UC campuses has inspired solidarity from faculty members who rely on the labor of their researchers and teaching assistants. James Vernon, chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, addressed a UAW picket on UC Berkeley’s campus, saying, “The system is broken and you’re going to help fix it and we are here as faculty to support you in that effort.”
UC’s academic researchers and workers are responsible for ushering critical intellectual work—not only to California, but also to the U.S. and world. “Our students in the sciences, they go on to become doctors, they go on to become engineers, that contribute to infrastructure, and also medicine,” says Chan. “I think it can’t be understated how important the university’s research is in social mobility, in improving people’s futures, and also in the arts as well, in creating work that moves people.”
The UC strike is also part of a broader trend of labor actions nationwide. In the same week that the strike began, Starbucks workers in more than 100 stores that have voted to join a union held a one-day strike to protest their employer’s refusal to bargain in good faith. UPS drivers, who are gearing up for a potentially major strike of their own next year, have been informed by their union, the Teamsters, that they can show solidarity with UC striking workers by refusing to cross the picket to deliver packages.
“For a lot of the academic workers at the UC, we see this pattern of indignity and unfair wages, unfair contracts, as a sort of universal theme, not only in the States but also worldwide,” says Chan. She cites that UC workers have been inspired by the actions of Starbucks workers in the U.S., as well as other companies and workers throughout the world.
“Not every teaching moment happens in a classroom,” says Chan. “Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.