Highlights:
- Disney dismisses 28,000 employees because California state legislatures aren’t reopening the Parks.
- The company has lost millions of dollars in the second and third quarters of the outbreak.
- While Disney’s theme parks in Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, Paris, as well as Florida have reopened and noticed a rise in customers.
Inside Story
The Coronavirus pandemic has affected various businesses, and even Disney is suffering a massive loss from the past few months. Very few people are visiting Disney’s California-based theme parks, and due to that Disney has noticed a decline in its revenue for the past few months. After examining the issues, the company has decided to lay off 28,000 workers in the parks.
On Tuesday, Josh D’Amaro sent a memo to the employees that revealed several decisions taken by Disney during this ongoing pandemic. The detailed memo also included removing thousands of employees from the park. According to the sources, on Tuesday, the company’s shares fell less than 2% after closing the bell.
According to the sources, the statement also mentioned that 67 percent of the employees at the company were part-timers. Furthermore, the company did not agree to break down the layoffs by each location.
Disney theme parks in Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, Paris, as well as Florida are open but for limited capacity only, and on the other hand, California Adventure and Disneyland are still closed in Anaheim, California, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
D’Amaro mentioned why they were cutting off 28,000 employees. He said that making such a tough decision was not easy for them. For the last six months, their management team has worked very hard to avoid removing any employee from Disney Park. They did everything a company would possibly do.
They modified their operations to work as efficiently as possible, furloughed their cast members while still paying benefits, suspended capital projects, as well as reduced expenses.
They had to separate 67% of employees because they could not stay fully staffed all the time while facing losses due to fewer customers. The company was also working at a limited capacity, so they had to make this tough decision.
The company has been losing money since the outbreak started. Sources say, in the second quarter, that Disney lost $1 billion due to closures of its cruise lines, hotels, and parks.
In the third quarter, the company reported a loss of $3.5 billion. Currently, D’Amaro, along with his team is trying to persuade California state legislators to give guidelines to reopen Disney Parks, however, they aren’t agreeing to lift the restrictions.
Conclusion
Disney Parks in Japan, Shanghai, Paris, and Florida are open for a limited time and have also seen success. The employees are maintaining all the safety measures and following the policies which require cashless pay, online mobile ordering for meals, and most importantly, availability of hand sanitization stations and wearing masks.
We will let you know once we get any information about the reopening of Disney Parks in California and other Theme Parks in the world.
