Update: Shortly after news of a class-action lawsuit being filed against the Walt Disney Company over its employee relocation plan, a senior vice president at Disney was caught making racist remarks about their hiring processes.
“There’s no way we’re hiring a white male,” said Michael Giordano while speaking with an undercover journalist.
Senior Vice President at Disney: "There's no way we're hiring a white male"
Stop funding companies that hate you.#BoycottDisney. Pass it on.
pic.twitter.com/mx3GkzdzlL— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 20, 2024
Katie Dowd
SFGate, San Francisco
Jun. 21—A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the Walt Disney Company over its canceled plan to move California employees to a new Florida campus that never materialized. On behalf of all impacted employees, two California-based Disney workers are seeking damages for what they say was a deceptive and disruptive period of their lives.
Maria De La Cruz, a vice president of product design, and George Fong, a creative director of product design, laid out their claims in a lawsuit filed to the Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday. De La Cruz was living in Altadena and Fong was living in South Pasadena in 2021 when the Disney Parks division announced it was moving thousands of employees to a yet-to-be-built $1 billion campus in Lake Nona, Florida, near the Orlando Airport and the Disney World Resort. At the time, Disney Parks planned to have 2,000 employees at the campus, including many in Imagineering, the famed group that creates theme park rides.
According to the lawsuit, Disney promised California employees that Florida would offer them more affordable housing, “strong performing schools and the availability of lifestyle amenities in and around Lake Nona.” But when faced with the decision to move, the lawsuit says “a large percentage” of affected California employees “declined to relocate to Lake Nona.” De La Cruz and Fong, though, elected to move, saying they felt pressured by the company to do so. Disney leadership “made it clear that employees who declined the relocation would lose their jobs,” the lawsuit says.
The pair then put their respective homes on the market, which was “a particularly painful decision” for Fong because “it was the family home he had grown up in and inherited,” the lawsuit says.
But the Lake Nona project never came to fruition. In May 2023, Disney parks head Josh D’Amaro confirmed the campus wouldn’t be built after all. “Given the considerable changes that have occurred since the announcement of this project, including new leadership and changing business conditions, we have decided not to move forward with construction of the campus,” D’Amaro said in a statement at the time.
De La Cruz and Fong felt they’d been “fraudulently” pressured to move. Despite “no visible indication that Disney had ever truly intended to develop it,” employees were allegedly given “false representations” by leadership to force their hand. The lawsuit also alleges that when Disney announced the relocation, home prices soared in the Lake Nona area. After the project was canceled, the plaintiffs claim it was difficult to sell the Florida homes they’d bought.
“Communications by Disney’s senior leadership in the wake of the Lake Nona cancellation were scant or nonexistent,” the lawsuit claims.
The plaintiffs are pursuing damages for themselves and any other California-based Disney employees who experienced a similar situation. They are seeking a jury trial. Disney officials have not commented on the lawsuit.
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