California Disney Characters Are Unionizing Decades After Florida Peers. Hollywood Plays A Role

By MIKE SCHNEIDER (Associated Press) ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — During three years of working as a parade performer at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California, Zach Elefante always has had a second or third job to help him earn a living. Unlike the experiences of his peers at Disney’s parks in Orlando, Florida, where there is a much smaller talent pool, the performers who play Mickey Mouse, Goofy and other beloved Disney characters at the California parks aren’t always provided a consistent work schedule by the company. It’s among the reasons the California performers are organizing to be represented by a union now, more than four decades after their Florida counterparts did so. While Disney asks character performers to be available to work at any time, that demand isn’t always rewarded with scheduled work hours, the California performers said. “A lot of performers get the sense that if they don’t give their full availability, we won’t be in shows … and that will impact other jobs we need to sustain a living in this area,” said Elefante, who lives in Santa Ana, California. Earlier this month, the California character performers and the union organizing them, Actors’ Equity Association, said they had filed a petition for union recognition. It’s a different era and a different union doing the organizing this time around, so the California character and parade performers likely will avoid some of the bad blood that the Disney performers in Florida have experienced with their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. It has been a rocky four-decade marriage in Florida between the performers who put the “magic” in the Magic Kingdom and the Teamsters, a union historically formed for transportation and warehouse workers which had deep ties to organized crime until the late 1980s. Why now for the California character performers, so many decades after their Florida counterparts organized?