California Disney Characters Are Unionizing Decades After Their Florida Counterparts. Hollywood Plays a Role

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ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — During his three years as a parade performer at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California, Zach Elefante always had a second or third job to help him make a living.

Unlike the experiences of his counterparts at the Disney parks in Orlando, Florida, where there is a much smaller talent pool, the cast members who play Mickey Mouse, Goofy and other popular Disney characters at the California parks don’t always receive a uniform The company’s work plan.

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That’s one reason California artists are now organizing to be represented by a union, more than four decades after their counterparts in Florida did so.

While Disney requires character actors to be available to work at all times, that demand is not always rewarded with scheduled work hours, the California cast members said.

“Many artists feel that if they don’t give their full commitment, we won’t perform in the shows… and that will impact other jobs that we need to make a living in this area,” said Elefante, who lives in the area of ​​Santa Ana, California.

Earlier this month, California character actors and their organizing union, the Actors’ Equity Association, said they had filed a petition for union recognition.

It’s a different era and a different union is doing the organizing this time, so California’s character and parade artists will likely avoid some of the bad blood that Disney cast members in Florida experienced with their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters .

It was a four-decade, rocky marriage in Florida between the artists who gave the Magic Kingdom the “magic” and the Teamsters, a union originally formed for transportation and warehouse workers that remained tight until the late 1980s had connections to organized crime.

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Why now for California character actors, so many decades after their Florida counterparts organized? Unlike Florida, where playing a character is often a full-time job, many of Southern California’s character actors have several other gigs, often in Hollywood films and television.

Elefante appears at the rival Universal Studios Hollywood and works as a tour guide for the film studios. In addition to appearing in the “Fantasmic!” Disneyland show, Chase Thomas works as an operations manager for a theater festival and has previously held jobs as a visual effects coordinator and an entertainment licensing agent.

Angela Nichols moved to California to work as a television writer and often works as a writer in addition to her job as an entertainment host at Disneyland, where she helps character actors interact with guests.

“Disney is truly a cornerstone of the stories we grow up with in our culture. It’s magical watching people immerse themselves in these stories and live them out,” Nichols said. “And if we are supported as actors and performers, we can achieve this. We’re just not as prepared for success as we need to be right now.”

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With many of their Hollywood gigs canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent actor and writer strikes, character actors wanted more consistent scheduling at Disneyland once it reopened after a year-long pandemic-related closure. The pandemic has also made them more aware of health and safety concerns around things like hugging guests and wearing sanitary clothing.

Most of the more than 35,000 workers at the Disneyland Resort in Southern California were already unionized, and parade and character department members were among the holdovers.

“A lot of performers want to do this full-time and make it work,” Thomas said.

Unlike their counterparts in Florida, character actors in California are organized by an artists’ union. As a result, Actors’ Equity Association leaders understand the unique needs of theme park performers in a way that would be difficult for other unions to understand.

For a new stage show, costume shoes must be tested to ensure that performers do not trip or slip on stage. Union officials are making sure “facial performers” whose faces are visible, such as Cinderella, are wearing proper makeup and making sure parade dancers have ice packs on hand to treat sore knees.

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Unclean costumes are an ongoing problem and were one of the main reasons Florida artists wanted to join forces with the Teamsters in the early 1980s. Other reasons included children kicking Disney villains like Captain Hook in the shins and adults grabbing the chests of cast members playing Mickey Mouse to see if there was a man or woman underneath.

Clean costumes were so important to Florida’s character actors that more than two decades ago the Teamsters successfully inserted a contract clause to allocate individual undergarments that performers could take home to wash after pubic lice and scabies were spread across the garments.

In Florida there has always been a culture clash between the costumed character actors and the traditional Teamsters union leaders of truck drivers and warehouse workers. Drivers often viewed the performers as people who lived charmed lives and were paid to dress up like it was Halloween every day.

These tensions came to a head in the late 2010s when a new manager at the local Teamsters branch in Orlando began harassing the costumed character actors. The character actors fought back and the fight spread to James Hoffa, then head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who intervened.

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In California, Elefante is confident that union representation will give performers a say in decisions on issues such as larger-than-life costumes, which can lead to long-term injuries if poorly fitted, and the safety of parades in the rain.

“It’s about having a seat at the table and being part of the conversation from the artists’ perspective,” Elefante said.

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Associated Press reporter Amy Taxin in Orange County, California, contributed to this report.

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Mike Schneider’s book, “Mickey and the Teamsters: A Fight for Fair Unions at Disney,” was published in October by the University Press of Florida. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.

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