Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Walt Disney Co. co-founder Roy O. Disney, continued her attacks on her namesake company in a series of tweets Thursday warning that “layoffs are coming.”
The 24-part attack focused on what she called the “greed is good” spirit of American corporations, including Disney, a matter of much greater urgency during COVID-19 and the resulting economic downturn.
The storm of tweets started with a re-tweet from a New York Times story about an executive compensation study in 3,000 public companies. The article concluded that top executives generally sacrificed little during the crisis, even when average workers suffered. Iger the Times reported,
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“Disney fired its workers because they intended to fire many of them, but they didn’t want the bad publicity that would come with the layoffs, so they decided to take the heat of two medium-sized public relations hits, rather than one. very big one, “wrote Abigail Disney. Wait for that. Layoffs are coming. I don’t expect Disney to pay people who don’t work for them, nor do I expect them to employ people who exceed what they can afford. “
He made two specific complaints about the Walt Disney Co. administration. The first was that the company spent “the past two decades prioritizing ‘efficiency and productivity’ in the form of smaller staff doing the same amount of work.” And the second was that “when they fired workers who were already living close to the bone, they shifted the moral burden of caring enough about those who mutually generate profits with them to the state and, therefore, to the taxpayers.”
Disney and other companies, he continued, “are asking us to pay the bill for their years of cutting the dignity of the American worker so that they can transfer all that ROAD upstream value to people like me.”
Repeating previous attacks on income inequality, Disney posed a rhetorical question: “Did you see how fast lines lined up at food banks? I wonder if any CEO would live a day, a week, a month as one of his own workers, just to find out. “
