By Day, a Sunny Smile for Disney Visitors. By Night, an Uneasy Sleep in a Car.

I know so so so many people who have jobs but with low wages---work another job just to scrape by!




By Day, a Sunny Smile for Disney Visitors. By Night, an Uneasy Sleep in a Car.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/disneyland-employees-wages.html
Jennifer Medina

Feb 27, 2018


Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

ANAHEIM, Calif. — On Disneyland’s Main Street, Emily Bertola spends hours working on her feet, embroidering names onto mouse ears at the Mad Hatter shop, where she has been an employee for the last two years. She usually offers visitors the sunny smile she was trained to give.

None of her customers know that for months, she slept in the back of her truck, showering at the park before her shift.

Her struggle is hardly unique to Disneyland.

Orange County is known for its affluence, and for its tourist industry. But the thousands of workers who keep its resorts, restaurants and hotels running are sometimes struggling to stay afloat.

As the state grapples with soaring housing costs, workers in California earning just above the minimum wage find it difficult to pay for basic costs. Many employees at Disneyland have moved farther inland, driving hours each day to work. Others, like Ms. Bertola, have opted to move from couch-to-couch or sleep in their cars for months at a time.

Disneyland Resort — which includes the theme park, California Adventure, and nearby hotels — employs roughly 30,000 people. It is the largest employer in Orange County and one of the biggest employers in the state.




Rebekah Pederson does her makeup in her car on the side of the road in Malibu, Calif. Some nights, she says, she drives along the Pacific Coast Highway, pulls over into a secluded spot, and attaches cloth to her windows before sleeping. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times



Despite their frustration with pay, in interviews with more than a dozen workers, many said they choose to stay at Disneyland, attached because of their childhood memories or reluctance to lose the perk of sometimes getting free tickets for their own children. And for many hourly workers, there are few options to make more money elsewhere. More than half of all workers in amusement and recreation, as Disneyland workers are classified, make less than $15, according to census data. About 85 percent of the 17,000 Disneyland employees who are part of a union make less than $15 an hour, according to union rolls. The current minimum wage in California is $10.50, and will reach $15 by 2022.

The cost of living is a particular challenge in Orange County, where a single adult would need to make about $33,000 a year to meet a basic monthly budget, according to the California Budget & Policy Center, a Sacramento think tank. Roughly 38 percent of the county’s 1.5 million workers earn less than that. It is an issue that many low-wage workers are confronting across the state: California now has the highest rate of poverty in the country, 20.6 percent, when accounting for taxes, housing and medical costs, according to the Census Bureau.

Ms. Bertola, 24, has considered looking for a job elsewhere, but said she does not believe she could earn significantly more without a college degree. She applied for an entry-level job at Disneyland after she could no longer afford college tuition. As soon as she was hired, she left her parents’ home near the central coast and moved several hours south.
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According to a survey of thousands of low-wage employees at the park, nearly three-quarters of workers who responded said they do not earn enough money to pay for their basic monthly expenses, and one in 10 said they had been homeless in the past two years. The survey and analysis were conducted by Occidental College and the Economic Roundtable, a group that has long supported raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and was paid for by a coalition of labor unions who represent many of the low-wage workers at the park

The survey was sent to about 17,000 workers in the park who are represented by labor unions and was completed by about 30 percent of them, including both full-time and part-time employees. The responses account for about 17 percent of the park’s overall work force.




Ms. Pederson brushing her teeth in a Starbucks bathroom in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

A spokeswoman for Disney said that the survey was “inaccurate and unscientific” and produced by “politically motivated labor unions.”...........................................