Edit 06/16/2020: This already gained far more traction than I ever expected it to, and I’m extremely gladdened for that. If you’re just looking for the e-mail template, scroll to the bottom; I talk a lot before that. If you’re angry and you disagree with me, I would encourage you to also use the e-mail template to make your voice heard! Just be sure to delete the text in the body and you’ll have everyone you need to contact to argue the Resort should reopen as planned.
An Open Letter to the Bobs and Co.
To the Bobs, both Chapek and Iger, Josh D’Amaro, Ken Potrock, Jim Doyle, Patrick Finnegan, Chip Koch, Kris Thieler, and Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Harry Sidhu, Rep. Lou Correa, and the members of the Anaheim City Council, and anyone else with whom this may be shared,
Allow me an introduction: my name is Joshua, and I am writing this to you as a proud Cast Member of the Disneyland Resort, as a proud lifelong Californian, and as something of a very nervous human being. Fortunately, none of these are experiences in which I am alone. So while the words today are mine and solely mine, I am writing on behalf of thousands of other people both very much and not at all like me, who think of the Disneyland Resort as a home away from home and are passionately wishing for its safe and happy return. I am uniquely privileged to say that the Disneyland Resort has played a huge part in nearly every one of my happiest memories over the last decade. I have been a frequent recipient of the special brand of magic in which we trade as first a day Guest, and later as a Cast Member. I have been given opportunities beyond my wildest imaginings that have allowed me to grow and change alongside the parks that I love. I am extremely proud of the near seven years of service that I have given the Disneyland Resort, and please rest assured that I ardently wish to be back making magic for our Guests and for my fellow Cast Members. I remember being aghast in March when told that the Resort would be closing. The Disneyland Resort had been a constant in my day-to-day life for years; it was unthinkable for it to be closing for any length of time. But more than my shock, I felt pride. Pride in my Company for being willing to take a monetary loss because the safety of our Cast Members and our Guests was so much more important to us than money. Truly, we were living up to our safety vision statement: “No one gets hurt.”
And indeed, as Cast Members, we are told that safety is the first and foremost concern for the Disneyland Resort. The Company spends a great deal of time and effort to make sure that every new hire feels welcomed, supported, and above all, safe. My earliest memories of the Resort as a Cast Member are filled to the brim with safety spiels and hazard trainings, capped off by the simple yet powerful reminder that “Our safety depends on my choices and actions.” We remind all new hires that safety is our first guiding principle, the first in our list of the Four Keys to excellent Guest service. I beamed with pride the first time I was given the opportunity to pass this message along when I began training new hires myself. It was a point I loved to emphasize because it speaks to what I believe to be another of the Company’s most important values: Integrity. The idea that we, as Cast Members, have a duty to not just go about our day under the assumption that everything will operate smoothly, but that we have a responsibility to actively choose to make the best decision available to us at any given moment. We must seek to actively make the safer choice whenever we have the option. When speaking to new hires, I often relate it to walking by a construction zone while you’re texting your friends: it doesn’t matter how many signs are around saying “Danger! Fall hazard ahead!” if you never look up and see any of them!
Well, at this moment we seem to be surrounded by signs warning, “Danger! Fall hazard ahead!” All of the epidemiological data available right now paints a crystal clear picture of a world that is still very much in the midst of an extremely virulent pandemic, the likes of which few people alive today have seen before. At the time of writing this letter, California bears the fourth highest caseload of COVID-19 in the entire United States of America. In the past thirty days alone, the number of new cases each day has nearly doubled. Well over half of those cases are located in Los Angeles County, and other counties nearby are not far behind. Orange County, home to The Disneyland Resort, has the fourth largest number of confirmed cases of all of the counties in the state. Hospitalizations in Los Angeles County have reached their highest point since early May, and little data exists that seems to suggest they will begin to plateau again any time soon. Given that many counties surrounding the Resort have walked back requirements on the public usage of face masks to reduce viral spread, all factors seem to point towards a potential resurgence of transmission. Barbara Ferrer, the Los Angeles County Public Health Director, is quoted in a Fortune.com article emphasizing that we may not yet even be out of our first wave, stating that “We’re not at the tail end of anything.”
Close to thirty-three thousand people work for The Disneyland Resort. Though the organizational leadership of the Company does not reflect the diversity of our nation — another conversation that desperately needs to be had, though I am not the one to have it — our Resort absolutely does. Likely thousands of our Cast Members are sixty-five years old or older. At the moment according to the CDC, eight out of ten deaths due to COVID-19 reported in the U.S. have been in adults sixty-five years old and older. Though it is difficult to know precisely how many based on publicly available data, it is likely hundreds or even thousands more of our Cast are immunocompromised for one reason or another. Estimates vary, but even using the conservative three percent estimate put forth by the CDC in 2016 suggests that we may have no fewer than nine hundred ninety Cast Members with some form of primary immunodeficiency. This number does not take into account people who may be immunocompromised due to malnourishment, cancer, or having been the recipient of an organ transplant, and so should be considered a significant underestimate. According to the CDC, approximately one in every thirteen people have asthma — that’s another two thousand Cast Members. The Washington Post has reported that COVID-19 kills Black people at six times the rate it kills white people in America. And none of these statistics reflect Cast Members who also provide care for people who fall under any of the preceding categories. Cast Members come in all shapes, all sizes, and all colors, and we must recognize that we are not all at the same degree of risk.
If we are truly committed to our safety vision, to the goal that “no one gets hurt,” then it is supremely irresponsible and unethical for us to aim to reopen the Disneyland Resort in July, however tempting the opportunity to celebrate our sixty-fifth anniversary may be. Given the reality of the threat posed by COVID-19, there is no way to make the Disneyland Resort a safe place for the thousands of at-risk Cast Members among our ranks. There is no way to make the Disneyland Resort truly safe for each and every Guest which comes through our gates. Until the Disneyland Resort can genuinely be a risk-free experience for any of us, we should not reopen. No Cast Member should have to choose between their job and their health and safety. No Guest should have to weigh the risks before stepping into the lands of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. Bobs, Josh, Ken, any and all of my fellow Cast Members to whom I have addressed this letter: please, please reconsider the proposal which you have put forth to our government. We have an opportunity to take a moral stance once again as a Company. I urge you to act with integrity. It will not be easy, but as Walt once said, “Whatever we accomplish is due to the combined effort.” Now, more than ever, we must be willing to make sacrifices for the good of all.
Equally, I turn my focus to our civic leaders: please, do not approve the plans which the Company has put forth at this time. Whether they choose to reassess their plans for opening or not, you have a duty to your communities and your constituents. When originally outlining the requirements for progressing beyond Stage Two, California Health & Human Services Agency Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly explicitly outlined requirements that any counties seeking to progress must have “no more than one case per ten thousand people in the past fourteen days and no COVID-19 deaths over the same period.” I implore you to bear in mind that Orange County as a whole currently has twenty-five cases per ten thousand people, and eight new deaths were reported on June twelfth alone. Anaheim has a rate of forty-two cases per ten thousand people. While these goalposts have been moved to facilitate a more rapid reopening of our economy since they were originally written, even the new guidelines put forth have yet to be fully met in Orange County. Our current road map for reopening requires counties to have the “minimum daily testing volume to test 1.5 per 1,000 residents,” which for Orange County comes out to four thousand seven hundred seventy tests. As of June eleventh, the county has yet to meet the minimum number of tests performed daily, with our highest reported number of tests in one day topping out at four thousand five hundred sixty-eight. Most days, the number of tests performed daily falls vastly short of that four thousand seven hundred seventy target, with June twelfth seeing a truly demoralizing six hundred sixty-eight tests completed, according to the OC Register. Simply put: we are not ready.
To anyone reading this letter, whatever your background, I would like you to consider a question we ask every new Cast Member who joins us at the Disneyland Resort: “Who are you safe for?” When we ask our new hires this question we often tend to get a moment of confusion before the question truly clicks. It isn’t something we often think of in our day-to-day lives, but it should be. Every single one of us has people in our lives who depend on us, who we are counting down the days until we can see again, who dance through our thoughts in our idle moments. We ask our new hires to think of the people for whom they are safe for the same reason we remind them that every Cast Member is responsible for the safety and well being of everyone who steps through our park gates, whether Guest or fellow Cast Member. We know how important it is for every person to play an active role in the safety of others. To continue my earlier metaphor, it isn’t enough that you, individually, make sure that you never text while you’re walking around — you also have a duty to speak up as you see someone else walking blindly into the fall hazard. It is the duty of every one of us to actively seek to make the Resort a safer place. We consider this a foundational message to every incoming Cast Member. I ask you to consider whether or not this is a message we can continue to share in good conscience under the proposed plans for reopening. For many of us, the message now rings hollow.
In a recent town hall, Bob Iger made a simple but impactful statement to Cast Members: “You shouldn’t be asking, you should be demanding of your company.” Though the discussion in question was focusing around the very real struggle our Black fellows have experienced, I would like to think that Bob would support any Cast Member seeking to better their company. For so many of us, this Resort represents the very best of what we are capable of as a people. We do not criticize it because we resent it or wish to see it fail, we criticize because we believe that it is capable of upholding all of its promises and more. It is in this hope that I have reached out to you, and I pray that my words will spur a change of heart. However, if you are choosing to disregard all I have said up until this point, and it truly is time for the Disneyland Resort to begin welcoming Guests once more, I must present to you a list of demands on behalf of all Disneyland Resort Cast Members. Though it must remain clear that the wording is my own, these demands have been crafted after hours of discussion with several dozen other Cast Members from across lines of businesses. It is not intended to be a final, perfect list of measures to provide safety to Cast Members as we return to making magic in our parks, but to be the beginning of an ongoing effort to restructure the way we approach safety. No proposal is perfect, but this is a start.
- We demand that all persons coming to the Disneyland Resort, Cast Member, Operating Participant, and Guest alike, go through on-site temperature screenings before entry.
- We demand access to on-site, voluntary COVID-19 testing for every Cast Member. In addition, we demand access to on-site, voluntary COVID-19 antibody testing for every Cast Member. Access to these tests will remain for the duration of the global pandemic.
- We demand the creation of a Contact Tracing Team for the Disneyland Resort to augment the extant Orange County Contact Tracing Team for the duration of the global pandemic. The Disneyland Resort’s Contact Tracing team will focus on maintaining information regarding Cast Member shifts to ensure that Cast Members will be immediately notified upon potential exposure to a coworker who tests positive for COVID-19. This Team represents a theoretical opportunity for Cast Members to be utilized in non-front line capacities, allowing more at-risk Cast Members to return to contributing to the magic.
- We demand that any Cast Member found to have come into contact with a coworker who tests positive for COVID-19 be immediately placed on a paid fourteen day sick leave to proactively isolate.
- Further, we demand the Disneyland Resort immediately double the rate of accrual of paid sick time (or equivalent) for all Cast Members, whether hourly or salaried, for the duration of the global pandemic.
- We demand that the Disneyland Resort create a special voluntary team of Cast Members to enforce all mask guidelines and physical distancing requirements with the complete and total support of Disneyland Resort Security to ensure non-compliant Guests or Cast Members are removed from the property for the duration of the global pandemic.
- We demand that the Disneyland Resort provide hazard pay for all Cast Members, hourly and salaried, who will be required to regularly interact with others as a primary aspect of their job duties for the duration of the global pandemic.
- We demand a Resort-wide commitment to fully sanitizing both on and off stage areas multiple times per day, in addition to providing sanitary wipes and hand sanitizer in all Cast common areas for the duration of the global pandemic.
- We demand that the Disneyland Resort immediately provide proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for all Cast Members, hourly and salaried, based upon their job duties for the duration of the global pandemic.
- We demand a written commitment from Resort Leaders to gather for a town hall meeting every month, whether conducted in-person or virtually, to allow hourly Cast Members to voice safety concerns across all lines of business in a public forum. We demand a reaffirmation that speaking out and sharing concerns will not jeopardize any Cast Members’ professional development.
It is my deepest hope that you will take the time to truly consider my words before you proceed with a course of action that could lead to the deaths of your Cast Members or Guests. While it is impossible for us to predict the future, the evidence available to us paints a clear picture of the risks which you are asking Cast Members to expose themselves to on a daily basis. I ask you: would you feel comfortable working out in any of our parks for forty hours a week? I suspect you already know the answer.
Sincerely,
Joshua Carranza-Vick
If you’ve made it to the end of this letter, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I’d encourage you to send a letter of your own! While a personal message will be most effective, if you struggle to put things to words, you can use the link below to generate a template to forward the message along! Just make sure to insert your name in at the start and end of the e-mail.
Here’s how you can send the message along yourself.
For the latest data about Coronavirus cases in Orange County, visit the OC Register.
Edit to add: Apologies to Chrome users, it seems the e-mail template doesn’t play friendly with that browser. Not super code-savvy so I’m not sure the best way to fix that. I might drop the template text and e-mail list here instead, but I’m going to try to find a fix first, as it would really artificially inflate the length of this post!