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.

Workers at the “newspaper of record” stopped working to demand better pay and labor rights—but only for a day. What would happen if they actually flexed their power?

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Strike activity in the United States appears to have reached an all-time high as the unionized staff of the New York Times recently joined the ranks of iconic brands like Starbucks and Amazon in agitating for their rights. More than 1,100 staffers, represented by the NewsGuild of New York, staged a one-day walkout on December 8, saying their hand was forced “due to the company’s failure to bargain in good faith, reach a fair contract agreement with the workers, and meet their demands.” It was the first time in 40 years that the paper boasting of publishing “All the News That’s Fit to Print” experienced such a labor action.

“We make the paper, we make the profits!” chanted striking workers in a raucous rally outside the Times’ headquarters. Some union members called on the public to show solidarity by refraining from accessing the digital edition of the Times, even in order to play the popular game Wordle. The NewsGuild has also called on subscribers and supporters to sign a petition in support of their demands, saying, “We are the people who deliver groundbreaking journalism and keep the newsroom running every day.”

The strike is particularly significant given that the Times is arguably the most influential journalistic outlet in the nation, framing political and economic issues for the public. It is considered the “national ‘newspaper of record,’” and its journalists have won more than 100 Pulitzer Prizes. They have leverage over their employer, although their reluctance to use it is apparent given both the rarity of such strikes and the very limited scope of the December 8 action.

Staffers have been working without a new contract since the last one expired in March 2021. After more than 20 months of negotiations, the New York Times Company, which owns the paper, has reportedly refused to budge on salaries, remote working limits, and other demands. According to the NewsGuild, “their wage proposal still fails to meet the economic moment, lagging far behind both inflation and the average rate of wage gains in the U.S.”

How radical are the Times workers’ demands? Among other things, they want a $65,000 salary floor, which is hardly a large amount for residents of New York City, one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S., and in the world. Workers have rightly rejected the paltry 2.75 percent annual wage increase that the company is offering—the same company that gave its top three executives raises amounting to about 32 percent from 2020 to 2021. Workers are also asking the company to fully fund their health insurance policies—again, not a radical ask.

Instead of meeting these basic demands, the company is operating like a money-hungry Wall Street corporation, by taking the massive profits it has made off the labor of its workers and setting aside $150 million to buy back stocks for its investors.

Another major workers’ concern is racial discrimination within the company. According to an August 2022 report by the NYT Guild Equity Committee, the company’s performance rating system is deeply discriminatory. Performance evaluations determine bonuses, and the report concluded that in 2020, “white employees accounted for more than 90 percent of the roughly 50 people who received the top score.”

Instead of using some of its profits to make its workers happy, the company offered them free Times-branded lunch boxes in September—part of a push to lure remote workers back to in-person work. “[M]y colleagues and I don’t need cute trinkets,” responded one Times staffer in September. She pointed out that “330 of us wrote emails last month asking for real raises to combat inflation.”

I was a unionized journalist for nearly 20 years as a member of SAG-AFTRA. Even though I worked for a nonprofit radio station, many of the issues my fellow staffers and I faced were similar to those at a for-profit outlet like the New York Times. Rather than cute lunch boxes, my radio station’s management once gave employees brand-new copies of the book Who Moved My Cheese?, a patronizing pro-corporate piece of pabulum intended to soothe workers without actually giving in to their demands. For years we worked for below industry wages, telling ourselves that our noble profession was a labor of love.

Journalists are meant to report on matters of social, political, and economic injustice. We don’t like to report on ourselves and our own industry. But, in a world where information is currency and travels at lightning speed, and disinformation has driven democracy into a corner, solid, dependable journalism is more crucial than ever. We are people. We too have to eat, pay bills, and go to the doctor.

In all honesty, the New York Times does not deserve its reputation for being the “newspaper of record.” It’s true that the paper has produced such groundbreaking work as Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, earning it the ire of right-wing extremists like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump.

But, analysts at the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) have, for years, called out the paper’s journalists and the editorial board for faulty, biased, incomplete, pro-corporate, or pro-government reporting. One September 2021 report by FAIR senior analyst Julie Hollar detailed how a Times reporter was “running interference” for wealthy elites when reporting on the Biden administration’s tax plan. Another report, from June 2021 and also by Hollar, demonstrated how the paper was merging content and commerce with a blatant non-advertising promotion for Amazon’s Prime Day. FAIR has produced dozens of such critical reports over the decades.

Now, Times workers who produce the news find themselves on the other side of the reporting as they demand fair working conditions. It’s a harsh lesson to see oneself as the victim of a predatory capitalist structure that chews up and spits out workers like they mean nothing. Within such structures is a continuous stream of money upward with only the barest allowable minimum being set aside to pay the labor costs required to make the product—in this case, the news.

A December 7 article that appeared in the Times explained that “Times journalists have rarely gone on strike. They did so for less than a day in 1981, and there was a brief walkout in 2017 to protest the elimination of the copy desk. No labor action has stopped publication of The Times since a strike of pressmen and others in 1978, which lasted 88 days.”

Clearly, there is a reluctance on the part of Times journalists to fully flex their power. But the point of a union is to extract what it needs from an employer by using collective power. The paper can, and did, wait out the 24-hour strike. If workers went on an indefinite strike until their demands were met, it might force the company’s hand—and it might make reporters more critical of business models that screw over workers for profits.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

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.

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

The rail industry can thank Congress and the president for helping it secure $321 million in annual profits at the expense of workers.
By Sonali Kolhatkar

The United States Senate acted in a show of rare unity recently in voting 80 to 15 to pass a bill forcing rail workers to accept their employers’ contract offer without a strike. There was no such unity to pass an amendment introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have given rail workers seven paid sick leave days. That bill did not pass even though 52 senators voted for it, as it failed the requisite 60-vote threshold.
According to the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, “Almost every elected member of Congress campaigns on being ‘for the working class.’” But, in response to the failure to pass the sick leave amendment, the Brotherhood pointed out that Congress’s actions “demonstrated they are for the corporate class.”

The Brotherhood is among several unions representing a little more than 100,000 people working in the rail industry. This is more than half of all rail workers in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Because trains operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, railroad workers’ schedules may vary to include nights, weekends, and holidays. Most work full time, and some work more than 40 hours per week.” A job so crucial that the entire U.S. economy is dependent on it pays a median salary of less than $65,000 a year with no paid sick leave whatsoever.
Explaining why Congress felt it necessary to pass a bill to make it illegal for rail workers to strike for better conditions, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “A nationwide rail shutdown would be catastrophic—a shutdown would grind our economy to a halt, and every family would feel the strain.” President Joe Biden similarly explained that the congressional intervention in averting a rail strike would help avoid “devastating economic consequences for workers, families, and communities across the country.”

An economy that devastates workers, leaving them underpaid for a high-pressure job with no sick days, is apparently just fine.
Instead of using its power to force the private rail companies to grant paid sick leave to rail workers, Congress used its levers of power to side with corporate forces rather than with workers. It chose to uplift profits over workers’ needs.
The cost of those profits is tangible and minuscule. Sanders pointed out in a tweet on November 29 that, “Guaranteeing 7 paid sick days to rail workers would cost the rail industry a grand total of $321 million a year—less than 2 percent of its profits.” Meanwhile, he added, “Rail companies spent $25.5 billion on stock buybacks and dividends this year.”

To help private rail companies secure $321 million a year in profits, Congress and the president inserted themselves into contract negotiations and sold out more than 100,000 workers.

As President Biden said in September 2021, “I intend to be the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” But nearly 30 years ago as a U.S. senator—on the matter of the rail industry in particular—he was more pro-labor than he is today, becoming one of a handful of senators to vote against averting a rail strike. Then-Senator Biden, explaining his ‘no’ vote, said in 1992, “I am… concerned that we are rewarding a concerted decision of the railroads [to negotiate in bad faith] that would have caused fevered expressions of outrage by industry had the unions taken a similar step.”
Today’s congressional intervention indeed rewards the private rail industry that has been engaged in a relentless bid to cut costs in the service of profits.

Corporate media outlets, whose business model is in line with rail companies, have disproportionately amplified lawmakers’ pro-industry talking points. But what are worker unions saying?

The International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, one of the unions involved, said it “does not support the notion of Congress intervening in our collective bargaining negotiations to prevent a strike.”
Instead, the union said, “If Congress truly wants to take action to improve the industry for our members, then we recommend legislation that will work to reverse the devastation of Precision Scheduled Railroading [PSR].”
Buried near the end of one article, Associated Press explained the gist of PSR without mentioning it by name, saying that, “The rail industry has aggressively cut costs everywhere and shifted its operations to rely more on fewer, longer trains that use fewer locomotives and fewer employees.”

According to rail company Union Pacific Railroad (UP), this method “keeps inventory (and supply chains) moving.” UP touts PSR’s “benefits to Shippers and Receivers,” who are the company’s’ primary customers. The company makes no mention at all of the toll this “efficiency” has taken on its workers.

Congress could have used its power to force rail companies to address the impact of PSR on workers. But instead, it used its power to side with corporate rail industry profits. It is an underlying assumption of how our society and government are structured that any intervention in the acquisition of profit is seen as a threat to the economy.

It’s no wonder rail workers feel betrayed. One Chicago worker named Rhonda Ewing told the New York Times ahead of the congressional vote, “We know it’s holiday time, which is why it’s the perfect time to raise our voices. If Biden gets involved, he takes away our leverage.”
Coming so soon after the 2022 midterm elections and far enough from the 2024 presidential election, lawmakers have few worries about losing reelection bids based on their voting record. This suggests that Congress and the president timed the votes to maximize their political leverage.
But rail workers are not likely to forget the government’s betrayal. “The political pandering and showboating by the elected officials in the Railroad’s pockets will not diminish our resolve nor remove the respect each Signalman is owed for keeping the economy afloat on a daily basis,” said the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen in a press release.

And other workers who are increasingly in solidarity with one another in an economy obviously rigged to benefit wealthy corporate employers, are angry too. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, for example, accused Biden of siding with “wealthy bosses,” and reiterated its support for unions saying, “we will always be in solidarity with all workers.”

Unions are drawing battle lines, demanding that the government flip the script of who the national economy is supposed to benefit.
“The Federal Government inserted itself into the dispute between the railroads and the Railroad Workers under the premise that it must protect the American economy,” wrote Tony D. Cardwell, president of BMWED-IBT, one of the rail unions involved in negotiating contracts. “Yet,” he said, “when the Federal Government makes that decision, its Representatives have a moral responsibility to also protect the interests of the citizens that make this nation’s economy work—American Railroaders.”

In other words, we need an economy that works for the people, not the other way around.
Cardwell warned that the lawmakers’ actions are “nothing less than anti-American, an abdication of their oath of office,” and that, “you are deemed, in my eyes, unworthy of holding office.”

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

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.