Disney heiress makes undercover visit to Disneyland and discovers staff have to 'forage for food in the garbage' because they're so poor - as she attacks company's $66m CEO Bob Iger for not affording them 'human dignity'
The heiress to the Disney fortune was left horrified after an undercover visit to the company's flagship theme park laid bare the desperate poverty of the staff working there.
Abigail Disney decided to tour California's Disneyland incognito after receiving a Facebook message from an employee who was struggling to make ends meet.
Since discovering the dire financial situations of the park's staff, she has publicly slapped down Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger whose eye-watering $66million annual salary is 1,000 times bigger than the average employee.
Abigail Disney was left horrified after an undercover visit to the company's flagship theme park laid bare the desperate poverty of the staff working there
'Every single one of these people I talked to were saying, "I don't know how I can maintain this face of joy and warmth when I have to go home and forage for food in other people's garbage,'' she told Yahoo News.
'I was so livid when I came out of there because, you know, my grandfather taught me to revere these people that take your tickets, that pour your soda.'
She added: 'Bob needs to understand he's an employee, just the same as the people scrubbing gum off the sidewalk are employees and they are entitled to the same dignity and human rights as he is.'
The 59-year-old, whose grandfather Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company, said that she emailed Mr Iger reassuring him that he was a terrific boss but urged him to consider his legacy.
She told him to push to be remembered as the person who made the world a 'better place' by closing the salary gap.
Disney has recently been embroiled in a gender pay row with four women reportedly bringing a law suit against the company.
They claim that Disney routinely denies women opportunities to climb the career ladder and gives them low-ranking job titles which do not pay its true workload requirements.
'The unequal pay infects the entirety of Disney. It's not just an isolated incident… The gap is pretty dramatic,' attorney Lori Andrus told the Guardian.
This is not the first time Abigail has publicly criticized Iger's enormous pay packet.
In April, she branded his $66million annual take-home 'insane' and said that such mammoth sums 'had a corrosive effect on society'.
Although Abigail is the heiress to the Disney fortune and says she has accrued more money than she will 'ever spend', she does not have any involvement of the daily running of the company.
Her father Roy E Disney was worth an estimated $1.2billion before he died in 2009.
Instead, the great-niece of Walt Disney is a documentary filmmaker and 'peace activist', funding peace-building programs in war-torn states.
Despite coming from a wealthy family, Abigail said she ended up developing her own view of money which was very different from her parents.
She has said that she watched her parents jump from well-off to ultra-wealthy while she was in college as Disney's stock price began to soar.
In an interview with the Cut, she said: 'So all of the sudden we went from being comfortable, upper-middle-class people to suddenly my dad had a private jet. That's when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life.
'My dad's plane was a 737, and it was insane to have a 737 as a private airplane. It had a queen-sized bed with one big long seat belt across it, and a shower, and it was ridiculous.
'(My parents) were in their 50s and they liked the shortcuts that wealth gave them.
'But what ends up happening is you end up being surrounded by people who don't tell 'no,' ever.
And as my father's drinking problem grew, he was surrounded by people who wouldn't say, 'You have a terrible drinking problem. You need to go get some help,'.'
During her interview for Yahoo's Through Her Eyes series, Abigail spoke of how her parents' alcoholism would lead to physical beatings.
She said: 'There's this assumption that I just was raised on fairy dust and rainbows.
'My parents were conservative and very strict and both alcoholics. So there was some violence in my home.
'Not all over the place, not all the time. But when you do get subjected to some violence as a child, you kind of never feel safe again. So we didn't feel safe in my home at all.'
A spokesman for Disney said: 'Disney is at the forefront of providing workforce education, which is widely recognized as the best way to create economic opportunity for employees and empower upward mobility.
'Our Disney Aspire initiative is the most comprehensive employee education program in the country, covering 100% of all tuition costs, books and fees so our hourly workers can pursue higher education free of charge, and graduate free of debt.
'Under Bob Iger's leadership, Disney has made an initial commitment of $150 million to fund this program in the first five years, and will continue to make significant investments to make Disney Aspire available to as many employees as possible.'
'Disney also provides flexible schedules and subsidized childcare to make it easier for employees to take advantage of this opportunity - and we're proud that more than 40% of our 88,000-plus hourly employees have already signed up to participate.
'American workers need meaningful change; they deserve smart policies and practical programs, like Disney Aspire, that empower them to achieve their goals and ensure they are part of the most competitive workforce in the world.'
