Disney Tech Staff Press Leaders on Layoffs After 159-Job WARN Notice
Disney technology employees asked streaming leaders at a town hall when more layoffs will come. Leaders gave no timing. The WARN notice and Character.AI hires.
Disney employees used a company town hall on Thursday afternoon to ask streaming leaders whether more layoffs are coming and when. According to Business Insider, two employees who attended said leaders gave no specific answer on either point. Disney did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.
The questions come after three rounds of cuts during CEO Josh D’Amaro’s first seven months and a late-October filing in California that signals 159 layoffs of park employees.
What Disney employees asked at the town hall
A software engineer submitted the question about the timing of cost cuts, Business Insider reported. Other employees asked about these topics:
- Why some senior employees received early retirement offers.
- Whether leaders could tell staff about benefit changes and layoffs before the news appears in the press.
- How cuts could affect the Media Platform Alliance, the group that includes streaming distribution, infrastructure and metadata teams.
- What a newly hired group from Character.AI, the AI chatbot startup, will work on.
Disney agreed to pay $60 million to hire 66 Character.AI staffers. Character.AI filed for bankruptcy in mid-October. Its former chief executive, Karandeep Anand, joined Disney in early October as technology chief.
Early retirement offers and the Bloomberg report
Deadline first reported the early retirement offers in late August. At a Bloomberg event on Oct. 1, Disney creative chief Dana Walden called the package “an extremely generous” offer.
Bloomberg has reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Disney planned to cut thousands of workers and that some managers were asked to aim for 20% in annual cost savings. Disney declined to comment to Bloomberg. The company has not publicly confirmed those plans.
What it means for Disney workers
For employees, the result is a long stretch without a clear answer. Several Disney technology workers described low morale to Business Insider. One high-level engineer said the reports of coming cuts were “very demotivating,” even after a positive annual review, and added that a good review had not meant job security in earlier rounds.
Another software engineer said colleagues were trying to show they were pulling their weight, with some senior technology staff attending meetings they would normally skip.
After the meeting, some employees criticized the answers on Blind, an anonymous forum that checks work email addresses before users can see a company page. One post said the meeting felt like “forced positivity” and that leaders ignored morale problems.
What to watch next
The California WARN notice is the only cut Disney has put on paper so far. WARN notices are filings that large employers must make before mass layoffs. This one covers 159 park employees. Any larger reduction of the kind Bloomberg described would show up in further notices or company announcements.
Source: Grit Daily
