It’s off to work we go: Teaching Disney and Media Labor
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The Walt Disney Company is a particularly rich object of analysis for media industries researchers and teachers. Over the course of the last century, it has occupied vastly different positions within the media landscape, from independent animation studio, to struggling corporation targeted for hostile takeover, to perhaps the most globally recognizable entertainment conglomerate. As Disney’s years at the bottom of the box office barrel and brushes with bankruptcy make clear, this trajectory has not been a meteoric rise. Nonetheless, many students enter my undergraduate class on Disney with a much narrower view of the company’s history as a rags-to-riches Cinderella tale—mythology that the studio’s own public relations machine promotes. Mapping the dramatic shifts in the company’s fortunes across the 20th and 21st centuries provides an opportunity not only to demystify Disney’s lore but also to deepen students’ understanding of key economic, cultural, and legislative forces that have shaped the contemporary media industries and Disney’s place therein.
Like many of my colleagues, I have been giving close consideration to the ways I teach students about media work and media workers in the wake of the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. In this piece, I would like to address this timely topic by focusing on two key events in the history of labor relations at Disney that I’ve been revisiting in this moment: the 1941 Disney Animation Studio Strike and the establishment of the Cultural Representative Program at the US Disney theme parks in the early 1990s. These two case studies are productive for helping students think historically and globally about labor in the media and entertainment industries.
The Disney Strike
The 1941 strike provides a useful framework for situating recent labor unrest within the broader history of Hollywood guilds’ labor actions and advocacy. As the strike is the subject of numerous books, articles, and documentaries, it is a historical event with which students in my class are often familiar.[1] The acrimonious nature of the dispute—vividly illustrated, for example, by striking artists’ acerbic signs that deployed the studio’s own iconic cartoon characters on the picket lines, and stunts like guillotining an effigy of Disney’s chief legal counsel Gunther Lessing—makes for an exciting topic that students are eager to discuss. While these more theatrical aspects serve as useful hooks to gain student buy-in, parsing the origins, outcomes, and implications of the strikes prompts closer examination of the industrial conditions that gave rise to the labor action. To contextualize the Disney strike, we begin by discussing the wave of unionization in Hollywood following the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. We then explore how this push impacted the animation industry specifically, focusing on the 1937 Fleischer Studios’ Strike, the subsequent formation of the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild (the predecessor of the Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839) and the arrival of the SCG at Disney.[2] In so doing, students engage with both secondary materials such as Tom Sito’s work on the history of animation unions and primary documents from the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild Collection at California State University Northridge, including union leaflets and the transcript of an inflammatory, anti-union speech that Walt Disney delivered to employees.[3]
To highlight the discrepancies between Disney’s PR rhetoric about working conditions at the studio and workers’ complaints about studio hierarchies and inequities, we then screen the 1941 animated/live action hybrid film The Reluctant Dragon (dirs. Alfred L. Werker and Hamilton Luske). The film, which is structured as a behind-the-scenes tour of Disney’s newly built Burbank facility, paints the studio as a cheerful working environment. Ironically, it premiered during the strike and was picketed by the very workers it ostensibly portrayed. Paired with this screening, students read Kirsten Moana Thompson’s article, “‘Quick–Like A Bunny!’: The Ink and Paint Machine, Female Labor and Color Production,” which examines, in part, how the film represents Ink and Painters and their feminized labor.[4] While the piece is not explicitly about the strike, it enables us to delve into the ways the division of labor and pay inequities at Disney—two central issues at the heart of the strike—were (and continue to be) deeply gendered.
To provide students with a broader industry perspective on the strike, we equally consider how it was covered in the trades. One of the key practical functions of this exercise is that it allows me to familiarize students with the Media History Digital Library, which they will use to conduct research for a term-culminating project. Students are tasked with using the platform to find two articles in Hollywood trade papers that discuss the strike. This activity asks students to examine how publications aimed at different sectors of the industry covered the strike, and to consider the biases and institutional pressures that shaped these perspectives. Finally, we look at the wider political ramifications of the Disney strike in the post-WWII period, namely Walt Disney’s involvement in the 1947 HUAC hearings. We read Walt’s testimony before the committee and situate it within the context of the Red Scare and labor politics in Cold War in Hollywood.[5] Taken together, this case study allows students to connect the labor movements of the 1930s-40s and the conflict at Disney to which it gave rise to those that artists and craftspeople are waging in the contemporary media industries.
The “Disney Visa”
The second case study, the Disney Cultural Representative program, broadens our scope not only by focusing on a different division of the corporation but also by offering both a more contemporary and a global perspective on labor in the media and entertainment industries. The Cultural Representative program recruits non-US workers from countries and regions represented in its stateside theme parks with the aim of creating “authentic” and “immersive” experiences for park guests. We begin by examining the legal frameworks that undergird the program to analyze the way media conglomerates like Disney interface with the political sphere. The legal backbone of the Disney Cultural Representative Program is the Q Cultural Exchange Visa—often colloquially dubbed the “Disney visa.” Per the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website, “the Q cultural exchange program is for the purpose of providing practical training and employment, and sharing the history, culture, and traditions of your home country with the United States.”[6] Visa holders may work in USCIS approved positions for a period of fifteen months.
The Q visa does not simply align with Disney’s particular international worker needs by chance. Disney crafted the legislation to fulfill its specific labor needs at the EPCOT World Showcase attraction at Walt Disney World. More precisely, former Disney World Director of Casting (the executive responsible for hiring park employees or “cast members”), in consultation with Disney’s in-house immigration counsel, its VP of congressional affairs, and political representatives (including the chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee), drafted the bill to establish the visa and pushed it through Congress. Their work culminated in its inclusion in the 1990 Immigration Reform Act, which codified into law the Q visa upon its passage.[7] Though initially designed for and implemented at EPCOT, Q visa workers now perform the labor of bringing ‘authenticity’ to simulated environments at both the latter park and at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
To begin to unpack the political and legislative dimensions of the Q visa and the Cultural Representative Program, students first read legal scholar Kit Johnson’s work on the history and implementation of the Q visa. We then discuss the economic impetus for and benefits of the program for Disney. The company incurs cost savings due to exemptions from paying for health insurance, pension plans, and FICA payroll taxes for Q employees. This, of course, raises important questions about worker exploitation and equity. Beyond their unequal access to benefits, Q visa holders also tend to make less money than their US cast member counterparts as their employment term limit prevents them from ascending the wage ladder. Just as we parse Disney’s PR rhetoric during the strike, for this case study we explore how the company markets this program—as well as its international college and short-term summer work programs—on its website. In small groups, students then complete a role-playing activity that has them walk through the complex and costly process of applying to and participating in the program from the perspective of hypothetical representatives from different regions. Each group must weigh the benefits and drawbacks of participating in the program for their particular fictional representative.
Lastly, this case study sets the stage for a broader discussion of Disney’s activities and influence in the political sphere. For example, we look at the company’s role in enacting key pieces of legislation like the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (sometimes dubbed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act as it delayed the character’s entry into the public domain). This allows us to examine how media corporations’ political lobbying has shaped legal and regulatory frameworks to cater to the interest of the major conglomerates and debate the pros and cons of such corporations exerting this kind of legislative influence.
Unsurprisingly given Disney’s enormous global popularity, a great many students in my Disney class are avid fans of the company’s media texts and entertainment experiences. One of the challenges of teaching the class is therefore that, at times, students’ potent affective ties to Disney make it challenging for them to critically examine its products, policies, and practices. Many of my students, however, are also media makers pursuing a career in industry. Looking at Disney through the lens of labor provides fruitful opportunities for connecting students’ professional aspirations with critical modes of inquiry. Analyzing the economic, cultural, and legal facets of Disney’s relationships with workers across divisions of the corporation enables students to think more deeply about how (and whose) labor is valued in the media industries, and what kinds of collective action can promote more equitable working conditions.
See, for example, Friedman, Jake S. The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2022 ↑
For supplementary readings on the Fleischer strike and this wave of unionization see, for example, Deneroff, Harvey. “‘We Can’t Get Much Spinach’! The Organization and Implementation of the Fleischer Animation Strike.” Film History 1, no. 1 (1987): 1–14. and Lent, John A. “The Unfunny Tale of Labor and Cartooning in the US and Around the World.” In The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media. New York: Routledge, 2015. ↑
Tom Sito, Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). ↑
Kirsten Moana Thompson, “‘Quick–Like a Bunny!’ The Ink and Paint Machine, Female Labor and Color Production,” Animation Studies 9 (February 2014), http://journal.animationstudies.org/category/volume-9/kirsten-thompson-quick-like-a-bunny/. ↑
Peary, Gerald, and Peary, Danny. “The Testimony of Walter E. Disney Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” In The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, 1st edition., 92–98. New York: Dutton, 1980. ↑
“Q Cultural Exchange | USCIS,” February 24, 2021, https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/q-cultural-exchange. ↑
Kit Johnson, “Beauty and the Beast: Disney’s Use of the Q and H-1B Visas,” New York University Journal of Law and Liberty 12, no. 1 (2018): 124–50. ↑
