One of the largely untold stories in America is the incredible number of people who are struggling economically. And I’m not just talking about the elderly on fixed incomes, the children, or the disabled. I am talking about people who go to work every single day.
In the midst of a “strong” economy, and with unemployment relatively low, tens of millions of our people are still forced to work two or three jobs, six or seven days a week. In the midst of massive income and wealth inequality, these workers are unable to find affordable housing or child care. Many of them lack the income to pay for health insurance or prescription drugs, and most of them have little or nothing in the bank as they prepare for retirement.
While Republicans have been increasingly vicious in their attacks against working families, I have long been convinced that Democrats have been much too weak in taking on corporate power and standing up for employees. The rich get richer, the middle class gets poorer, and Democrats remain much too silent. Too many Democrats spend too much time raising money from the wealthy and corporate interests and too little time fighting for those who are being economically exploited. Come election time, Democrats ask workers for their support and continue to be surprised when these workers don’t show up to vote or, even worse, vote Republican. The bottom line is that if you don’t stand up for your constituents, they’re not going to stand up for you.
On June 2, I went to Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland. I wasn’t there to take my grandchildren to meet Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse or to go on the rides. I was there to attend a rally with over 1,500 Disney workers who were being ruthlessly exploited by Disney, an extremely wealthy and powerful multinational corporation. The rally was organized by a number of unions and held in a large church. A union organizer, Jennifer Muir Beuthin, whose grandparents had actually met when they worked at Disneyland many years before, opened the program and introduced me. I spoke for a few minutes and was followed by six current Disney workers who told us about their lives.
My remarks were straightforward. Disney is a $150 billion corporation and made $9 billion in profits in 2017. It received a $1.5 billion tax break from the Trump tax giveaway to the rich and, unsurprisingly, has received hundreds of millions in local tax breaks from the City of Anaheim. Further, I thought it ironic that, while paying its workers extremely low wages, the Disney board had recently reached a four-year compensation agreement with its CEO, Bob Iger, for an estimated $423 million.
And yet, while Disney’s profits soared, and its CEO received an unimaginable amount of money, the wages and benefits for the workers at Disney were atrocious. The people who walked around all day in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck costumes, the workers who prepared and delivered the food, the men and women who collected tickets and managed the rides made wages so low that they were barely surviving.
In October 2017, Occidental College issued a report on the economic condition of the workers at Disneyland. Anaheim is an expensive community in which to live. And yet, despite steep increases in the cost of housing and other necessities, Disneyland workers have suffered steady pay cuts, after adjusting for inflation.
The average hourly wage for Disneyland Resort workers in real dollars dropped 15 percent from 2000 to 2017, from $15.80 to $13.36. Today, over 80 percent of Disneyland workers make less than $15 an hour. Almost three-quarters say that they do not earn enough money to cover basic expenses every month. Over half of Disneyland employees report concerns about being evicted from their homes or apartments.
Incredibly, more than one out of ten Disneyland Resort employees report having been homeless (or not having a place of their own to sleep) in the past two years. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of Disneyland Resort workers are food-insecure. Only 28 percent report having the same schedule every week.
Reports and statistics are one thing. Hearing real human beings describe what’s going on in their lives is another, and the testimony we heard from the six Disney employees was both heartbreaking and mind-blowing.
Glynndana Shevlin sat next to me onstage. The fifty-eight-year-old food and beverage worker and member of Unite HERE Local 11 has worked at Disneyland for thirty years. Over the past decade, she’s seen her wages go up a whopping $2.
“I go hungry most days on one meal a day,” she told the crowd, according to the Washington Examiner. “I work in the most beautiful room in the Adventure Tower at the Disneyland hotel.… I feed these guests the most amazing gourmet food you’ve ever seen that at the end of the day gets thrown in a recycle bin. If I eat that food or even try it[—]they call it separated from the company[,] like we’re family—you’re going to be shunned. They freakin’ fire us if we eat one little crumb.”
There’s no moral defense for this. As I said that day, “Let me break the news to people watching: ducks don’t talk, mice really don’t talk. That’s fantasy—this is reality. And the reality is that someone who has worked for an enormously successful and profitable corporation for thirty years should not be going hungry.”
My appearance in Anaheim attracted the attention of the Disney Corporation. The day before I arrived, they made public an offer they had negotiated with the unions. I agreed with the unions that while the offer was a modest step forward, Disney had a very long way to go to meet the legitimate needs of its workers.
While I was there, Disneyland spokeswoman Suzi Brown issued the following statement: “We are proud of our commitment to our cast, and the fact that more people choose to work at Disneyland Resort than anywhere else in Orange County. While Mr. Sanders continues to criticize Disney to keep himself in the headlines, we continue to support our cast members through investments in wages and education.” Hmmm. Attacking me rather than defending their employment policies tells me that they know they are in the wrong, big time.
Back in Washington, my staff produced social media video clips of the workers’ testimony, which were viewed by millions of people. I will continue doing everything I can to work with the unions there in demanding decent wages, benefits, and working conditions at Disneyland. The bottom line is that if you work forty hours a week or more, you should not be living in poverty.
While in Southern California, I was able to observe that starvation wages were not unique to the workers in Disneyland. After we left Anaheim, we traveled to the Port of Los Angeles, where we participated in a rally with truck drivers organized by the Teamsters. I was joined there by Congresswoman Nanette Diaz Barragán.
The issue here goes beyond the terrible wages and working conditions that these mostly Latino truck drivers receive. What they are up against is a growing practice in our economy of employers engaging in illegal wage theft and the misclassification of their employees.
In the case of these workers, in order for them to get a truck-driving job they had to sign on as “independent contractors” and were forced to lease the trucks they were driving for an outrageously high fee. The result: After paying all of the insurance, fuel, maintenance, and other costs associated with leasing a truck, one driver told me that he worked one hundred hours one week, and not only did he not get paid, but he ended up owing the company a check. Other drivers talked about working seven days a week and sleeping in their trucks.
As independent contractors, these workers receive no guaranteed minimum wage, no overtime pay, and no health care or retirement benefits, and they have to pay 100 percent of their Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. In many ways, not only are they ruthlessly exploited, but they exist as modern-day indentured servants. They work incredibly hard but often go further and further into debt.
I am proud to have recently introduced legislation to stop companies from misclassifying workers as independent contractors and to make it easier for workers to form unions. Sixteen of my Senate colleagues have cosponsored that bill.
My last public event of the day in Southern California was a wonderful and unique experience. Along with some of the leading criminal justice advocates in the country—Shaun King, Patrisse Cullors, Ivette Ale, Melina Abdullah, Jayda Rasberry, and Jasmyne Cannick—we held a rally, actually two rallies, calling for fundamental reform of our broken criminal justice system. The event was held at the Million Dollar Theatre, the oldest movie house in Los Angeles, which seats 2,300 people. The reason we held two rallies was that we had a large overflow crowd, and before we began the event in the theater, we had to go outside and address the thousand people who were unable to get in.
The size of the crowd told me something very important. And that was that criminal justice was no longer a fringe issue, supported by Black Lives Matter and a handful of other grassroots organizations. Because of the tireless work of the people who were up on the stage with me, people who had devoted their entire lives to the struggle, criminal justice was an issue that was now prime time and was finally getting the attention it deserved.
Shaun King, who had helped organize the event, had a really brilliant idea. He was trying to redefine the function of a district attorney or a prosecutor. He talked about Real Justice PAC, an organization he had cofounded, which was helping elect progressive district attorneys and prosecutors across the country. This organization was supporting candidates who were not about simply locking up more and more people. Instead, they were trying to address the real causes of crime and to lower the jail population.
Patrisse Cullors is an artist and organizer and a cofounder of Black Lives Matter. She talked about her efforts to stop a $3.5 billion jail expansion plan in Los Angeles County. In this effort, she couldn’t be more right. Think about it for a moment. Schools and job-training programs around the country are underfunded, and we have millions of kids leaving school completely unprepared to find jobs in today’s complex economy. Somehow, we have billions of dollars available for more jails and incarceration, but we can’t afford to provide these kids with the education they need to survive in modern America. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I was honored to be up on a stage with these heroes and heroines and will continue working with them in the months and years to come. Let us end the international embarrassment of the United States having more people in jail than any other country. Instead, let’s fight to make this country the best educated on the planet.