In May 2024, an overwhelming majority of the 1,700 employees who perform in character, along with hosts, trainers, and other Cast Members who make the magic happen for guests at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure Park voted to unionize with the Actors’ Equity Association, forming a brand new unit called ‘Magic United’. They joined the tens of thousands of workers at the Disneyland Resort, from cleaning crews to security staff, who are already in labor unions.

A couple weeks after the vote, I had the opportunity to speak with some of the talented staff at the Actors’ Equity Association who supported this effort, including Stefanie Frey (she/her), Director of Organizing & Mobilization, and John Meredith (they/them), Organizing Assistant.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today! To kick things off, would you give us some background on how this organizing effort came about?

Stefanie: Two years ago, in April 2022, ‘the Hug Rule’ was reimplemented at Disneyland. The hug rule, if you’re not familiar, is that you don’t let go [of the hug] first, essentially. That’s very important in the character world. While it was a longstanding Disney policy, of course, with Covid, there was some concern not just about the policy itself, but about how it was reintroduced. [The workers] didn’t have any voice at the table. 

And so a small group of workers started talking amongst themselves. They got some assistance from the Orange County Labor Federation, as well as a few other sibling unions, on building out their leadership structure. When we connected, they had already built up an organizing committee, they were having organizer meetings, and they were even having general supporter meetings. They had some structure — they had a Google sheet of where they were tracking conversations and who was talking to who.  

“The Activity Stream was invaluable for me personally, having a global view and just being able to quickly get the pulse of the campaign.”

— Stefanie Frey, Director of Organizing & Mobilization, Actors’ Equity Association

Disney is such a nuanced workplace, so there was a lot of information packed into this Google sheet that we were getting handed at the beginning of the campaign. These people were ready to go. 

The largest campaign we have done before this was a hundred people. We did organize Walt Disney World in the late eighties, which covered 420 people. So we knew that to work at this scale, we needed the right tools. I went to Christian Sweeney [Deputy Organizing Director, AFL-CIO] and said, “Dude, we want to take this on, but we need some help.” And he was like, “What you need is Action Builder. Let me connect you.” 

You alluded to the different worlds and the different stories and areas of the parks. How dispersed and siloed is this workforce? Are there places where they’re mixing, or is it, ‘I know the people who are in costume on either side of me’, and that’s basically it?

Stefanie: They definitely intermix, because people will have multiple approvals and work in multiple areas. There are some small segments of people, like Dining. The people who do the Princess Breakfasts or Goofy’s Kitchen, that’s a very siloed world because they’re literally in the restaurants, they’re not in the parks. 

And then the [employees in the] parades are more siloed because they’re more like what Equity’s actually more familiar with from traditional shows. You are cast to be in this parade. You only work in this parade, you might do a couple different roles within that parade, but you’re only in this parade. There were three parades, and they do overnight rehearsals for parades because that’s the time that the park is closed and they can practice in the streets, which makes sense. But keeping track of who’s on what show was important too, because we needed to know who’s in overnight rehearsals right now, why aren’t we hearing from people? So that I would say is more of the siloed-ness, but someone who’s Mickey Mouse in Town Square one day could be working with a Stormtrooper in Galaxy’s Edge the next day. So it’s really intermixed and very interconnected.

So what was it like rolling Action Builder out to this group? What was that onboarding process like?

Stefanie: There were definitely a lot of people that took to it pretty quick. It was interesting, in part of our debrief process, we were talking about how Action Builder was very much the core of the campaign as far as our data, but there was still a need for the occasional Google Sheet because people are still more familiar with that and seeing it in that traditional Excel format. But most of our core leaders were tracking the numbers better than I was. They were hawks on Action Builder. 

The Activity Stream was invaluable for me personally, having a global view and just being able to quickly get the pulse of the campaign. You’re seeing a bunch of 2s coming in, or you’re seeing a bunch of 4s come in, or you’re reading notes and you’re like, ‘they marked them as a 2, but this conversation sounds like they are absolutely a no, we should follow up with that organizer’. The Activity Stream created an accountability system where we were also able to see if people weren’t getting it or were not fully using it, even seeing who are the people that are not entering anything and what’s going on with them, how can we follow up with them?

John: Especially regarding meeting people where they’re at, the dream is to have everything in one place, but there are of course the people who are overwhelmed by any kind of technology. And there were things we couldn’t do on Action Builder, [such as] collecting digital cards with a Microsoft form. So that was external to Action Builder, but what was really great for me is it was so easy to communicate between the two. I could do an export from Action Builder and update any list over there. And then any change outside of [Action Builder] was easy to update right back, so they communicated together really nicely. 

I imagine the ability to see the play-by-play in the Activity Stream must have been a very useful feature but also something that you really wouldn’t have with just a spreadsheet. Do you think that was a factor in the speed with which all of this came together and how quickly you all got to that union vote?

Stefanie: I think when we took the campaign on, because the conversation had been percolating, I knew the support was there. I didn’t want to allow time for a busting campaign or people to start spreading misinfo. It was definitely part of the game plan but Activity Stream created the accountability for us to see whether we were able to get there or to find our weak links or spots that we needed to address.

I would also say I think the Activity Stream, for me it became my Super Bowl, maybe just because it was my job, but I imagine there were other people, organizers that were sitting there refreshing their Activity Stream. And I think there was something of gamifying the campaign that made it approachable for people. And I think it helped some of our organizers see that we have a process, we have a system.

I love to hear that. I want to thank you both for your time. Any final thoughts before we go?

John: I will say it was really great working with this team, the AFL-CIO team involved with Action Builder. Shelly [Wen, Senior Organizing Data Strategist, Data Analytics and Infrastructure Resource, AFL-CIO] was so involved at the beginning, and we absolutely could not have done this without her. And then being in the Action Builder Working Group meetings was just wonderful because you could clearly see that the team was taking input from everyone and the feedback we were giving, of course it takes time to develop, but we would see it leading to changes being made. So just working with a group where I can see that you’re actually working to make this tool fit what everyone needs and speaking with the users was very helpful. It felt like, ‘I’m glad this is a tool we’re using’.

Thank you to Stefanie and John for taking the time to tell us about this experience! And congratulations to Magic United for this incredible win!

Click here to learn more about Magic United. Click here to sign up for a live, virtual demo of Action Builder.