Can a Profit-Hungry Disney Sell Cosmopolitan Values and Still Mean It?

In 2024, unionised workers at Disneyland authorised a strike, arguing that 73 per cent of their colleagues could not cover basic living expenses while often working 12- to 14-hour days. The strike was averted. The company whose parks broadcast a message of shared humanity kept operating as usual — and one philosopher who loves those parks says that tension deserves a harder look.

The essay, which frames EPCOT's evening fireworks around Walt Disney World's manmade lagoon, opens with the show's narration: "Everyone on this Earth is part of the great Symphony of Us." The author, a philosopher and repeated Disney visitor whose 19-year-old daughter is intellectually disabled, admits the language is "high-minded, sentimental stuff" for a park featuring a talking snowman and a rat who becomes a chef. Yet at a time of rising scepticism about multiculturalism, he writes, the message resonates with him.

The question he poses is blunt: is the value of a family's Disney World experience undermined by the fact that it is, at the end of the day, a production of the Walt Disney Company? Can a profit-driven corporation be trusted to teach children universal values — and does the message need to be sincere to matter?

What does the record actually show?

The case against Disney is not thin. The 2024 strike threat sits in a long line of labour controversies stretching back to the animators' strike of 1941, through protests over conditions in factories making Disney products, to a series of layoffs across the company earlier this year.

On cultural questions, the record is similarly mixed. Writing in The Guardian in 2021, journalist Steve Rose noted that "Disney's history of racist caricatures and ethnic stereotyping has been well documented and routinely criticised: the crows in Dumbo that drew on racist minstrel caricatures of African Americans; the Islamophobic tropes in Aladdin; the mockery of Native Americans in Peter Pan… the list goes on."

The media scholar Janet Wasko, in her book Understanding Disney (2001), adds a critique of the studio's portrayals of women: heroines are "always beautiful, shapely, and often sexually attractive", while female villains are "typically ugly and either extremely thin (Cruella) or grossly fat (Ursula)", perpetuating mainstream American beauty norms.

Does manufactured desire invalidate the experience?

The author anchors the economic objection in John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958), which coined "the dependence effect" — the process by which a business creates the desires it then satisfies. Disney, plainly, wants to manufacture the urge to ride Frozen Ever After and photograph children with Mickey and Minnie. For Galbraith, the problem is that this hands too much control over our lives to people who simply want to make money.

The counterargument comes from an unlikely ally: Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who spent much of his career warning against precisely the collective sentiment EPCOT sells. Hayek argued that what matters is not where desires originate but whether satisfying them makes our lives better. The author, no libertarian, concedes Hayek is "probably right on this point".

What changes for families, then?

The practical answer lies in the author's own household. His daughter's disability limits trips elsewhere — the Grand Canyon's beauty was "somewhat lost" on her because she cannot hike long distances or navigate uneven terrain. Disneyland, on a trip out west via Las Vegas, was the one place where everyone engaged on roughly equal terms.

The parks' universalistic design does specific work: the Haunted Mansion bemuses rather than terrifies; Pirates of the Caribbean rewards sustained attention; Festival of the Lion King connects audiences to the films immersively; Star Wars and Avatar attractions satisfy viewers who never saw the films. Tamer options — It's a Small World, Jungle Cruise — sit alongside Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. "There is a sense of something shared, however briefly and however manufactured, that I don't find in many other places," he writes.

His conclusion is deliberately unheroic. The value of these experiences "does not redeem Disney's labour practices or its other missteps". If anything, he argues, it gives fans more reason — not less — to pressure the company to live up to the ideals its parks portray. Pure intentions, he suggests, may not be a precondition for genuine value.

What remains unaddressed, tellingly, is whether a company can be pressed toward those ideals by customers who keep paying at the gate.