And you thought Mickey was a sweet and innocent mouse. Wrong!
PBS just featured an in-depth look at Walt Disney in its American Experience series during which we learned how virulently anti-union Disney was…and now we learn that his greedy, money-grubbing at the expense of his employees-ways are still embedded in the Disney culture.
I first learned about the H-1B visa program from my friend Mitch Heldt. Mitch is an engineer and has invented some groundbreaking technologies that could help mitigate the effects of climate change, but he’s been sidelined in favor of foreign workers brought over with H-1B visas.
Although the guidelines for this program are quite strict, there is apparently little to zero oversight as abuse is rampant.
The latest exploitation of the program comes from the house of mouse itself.
…about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
On today’s show, I spoke with James Otto, an attorney who specializes in civil rights and employment law and is representing one of the fired Disney employees.
The tech gods have not been on my side lately, and today was no exception! Skype is out for everyone, but thankfully I was able to put my cell phone through the audio console and eventually get Joel Silberman on the air to talk politics and media. Politics and media, a fascinating combination these days…
Tomorrow, it’s the return of the Gliberal Goddesses and whatever else the day throws our way, radio or not!
There’s a great book on the “ideology” of Disney World & EPCOT written by a fellow Floridian faculty member.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/467633.Vinyl_Leaves
It’s basically on how WDW, maybe especially EPCOT, kind of presents this view of how corporations will bring us techno-utopia. Every ride in EPCOT has a corporate sponsor: Spaceship Earth (named after Buckminster Fuller) is also brought to you by the “Death Star” of AT&T.
Ol Walt was a douchebag. He was an FBI informant, turned in many of his fellow comic artists into the FBI for “red-baiting” activities. He also was a rampant anti-Semite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney:_Hollywood%27s_Dark_Prince
But no, he never had himself cryonically frozen, that’s an urban legend.