The Pains & Pleasures of Working for Disney
Disney is one of the most recognised icons of modern society, this is of course directly linked to the fact that it is one of the biggest TNC’s on the earth, with is having a whole array of subdivisions, including; marketing, movie production, theme park operation, production of merchandise & many more. However as with every major TNC there are areas of its operations that it is happy for the public to see & those which it is not.
One of the main areas of Disney that the public gets to experience & interact with is the theme parks it has throughout the continents. With the movies & the TV shows acting as precursors to establish characters & basic ideas of the Disney philosophy it presents to the public. The most major of these theme parks is the Disney World in Orlando, Florida. This is the Disney of choice for Americans & Europeans who have travelled to America to visit the state or the USA as a whole. This is the reason why the image that the theme park portrays is so important.
Here Disney will make sure to show you the best of what it can do, such as brilliant displays & presentation of characters & locations people will recognise in the movies, as well as the parades that happen twice a day. On top of that are the flawless firework displays & the precise timings of all the automated features, such as displays having moving parts. On top of this, and this is especially the case with the Orlando resort, the feeling that you are isolated from the rest of humanity & are really in this magical place. This is why Disney has set the very hard bench mark for competitors to follow, with the aim that they simply cannot compete. Another key feature of this side of Disney is the fact that in places like America, Europe & Japan, Disney feels it is justified to pay at least the minimum wage to its employees. And this helps to portray it in a public light in terms of job relations in the west. However this is not the case with other Disney operations.
Disney clearly needs a division associated with the manufacturing if its merchandise. And while Disney likes to promote this feeling & philosophy of a tight knit, small town, ‘classic American’ community, it has been a TNC that had grown massively due to Globalisation. This means that they have no problem with outsourcing work to countries where the economic & working regulations are enforced much more weakly, if there really is any at all.
A classic example of this that is associated with Disney is the outsourcing of production of Disney brand clothes to Haiti. In 1996 it was revealed that Disney was not even paying the Haitian workers enough to feed themselves & their families. The New York-based National Labour Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America (NLC) said: ‘Haitian contractors producing Mickey Mouse and Pocahontas pyjamas for U.S. companies under license with the Walt Disney Corporation are in some cases paying workers as little as 15 gourdes (US$1) per day -- 12 cents an hour -- in clear violation of Haitian law’. They also said that the Haitian workers were at prominent risk of exceptionally long working hours & sexual harassment. And while they adimited the Haitian economy needed to be competitive with wages to grow, they said it was no justification for breeches in workers’ rights.
Despite several political situations, such as the downfall of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 & other problems that led to usability, with a large amount of sweat shops having closed by 1991, the working conditions in Haiti are still extremely poor. This has lead to assembly zones in Haiti where economic aid is provided by organisation such as the World Bank to help repair the economy. However, only 72 assembly firms employing some 13,000 people had been re- established by September 1995, according to a Haitian government agency.