Walt Disney Co. cuts 1,900 theme park jobs over the past six weeks
We've seen theme parks all around cut jobs, some going bankrupt, others just re-organizing. This time it's the Walt Disney Company.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, the Walt Disney Co. acknowledged Friday that it had cut 1,900 jobs in 6 weeks, including 1,400 in Florida alone. This makes for the largest amount of job cuts since Disney cut between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs in Orlando during spring 2001. Disney is Central Florida's largest employer and is said to have had about 62,000 local employees before the recent cuts.
Kinda sorta. Several hundred of the job cuts were open positions. Meaning there were like 700 job openings that Disney decided they were not gonna fill.
Well, that's unfortunate. I'm sad to see it.
Keep in mind the jobs that have been axed are all back of house positions. Not on stage stuff.
Any show manager will tell you, backstage positions are pretty important. Now more people get to work harder for the same low wage this summer. 62,000 seems a bit much, even for a complex the size of Disney. Maybe that's the number during peak season, and I'm thinking that they keep a lot of part time staff as well instead of a lesser number of full timers in order to prevent overtime and such.
Its the best of times
OK, I have no real plans to ever go to Disney, although we do talk about it. But I decided, on a whim, to look at the "free meal plan" offer which is being advertised on either side of this entry.
It is impossible to keep any system truly 24/7 and most maintenance windows are from 2 am to 6 am on systems that service the amount of people Disney does. So I don't see that as too out of the ordinary.
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