The Orlando Sentinel has just released part 1 of a 5 part special report regarding life in Orlando, Florida, a city that is reported to be "America's most visited city":
www.orlandosentinel.com
In a theme park parking lot at night, a worker sleeps in her car. This is life in America’s most visited city
You’re not supposed to see them like this, their polyester prince costumes unbuttoned and backpacks hanging from the shoulders of their colonial period dresses. Flip flops on, lunch boxes in …
www.orlandosentinel.com
December 5, 2019
In a theme park parking lot at night, a worker sleeps in her car. This is life in America's most visited city
You're not supposed to see them like this, their polyester prince costumes unbuttoned and backpacks hanging from the shoulders of their colonial period dresses.
Flip flops on, lunch boxes in hand, legions of workers stream into an employee parking lot at Walt Disney World, weary from another shift of making magic at the world's busiest theme park.
This is the place where the pixie dust loses its sparkle.
It's where the low-wage workers who power Orlando's tourism machine leave the attractions, hotels and eateries and fade into a community that doesn't have enough affordable housing, public transportation or opportunities in industries with higher-paying jobs.
A year after a landmark decision by Disney to raise its minimum wage for about 40,000 union workers to $15 an hour by 2021, many of those employees are better off. By October, the number of unionized workers earning more than $15 an hour had more than quadrupled to 13,057 compared to August 2018, according to the Service Trades Council Union.
But people earning near the $15 mark, long considered the gold standard for a living wage, still find their paychecks barely cover the basics — so they move farther from the attractions to find lower rent and make difficult decisions each month about whether they can pay overdue medical bills or buy enough groceries to feed a family.
They're people like Gabby Alcantara-Anderson.
She hops off an employee bus at the lot for Magic Kingdom workers at 12:12 a.m. on a humid September night and makes a beeline for her Kia Soul where a permit on the back window reads: Frontierland Cast Member. After almost seven years at Disney, she spends her shifts monitoring rides while also answering guest complaints at the park's Old West-themed land, home to the Splash Mountain flume and Country Bear Jamboree.
She slips out of sneakers and into black Crocs, climbs into the car, pulls out of the parking lot and heads to a 7-Eleven on Disney property. It happens to be a good night: She has enough cash stowed in the sunglasses case above her head to buy gas for the 63-mile drive to her home south of Lakeland.
But sometimes on the worst nights, when the tank is on E and she can't scrounge even a few bucks for gas, she doesn't leave the lot.
Instead, she pulls into a dark corner, cracks the windows and reclines the seat all the way back. She calls her family, and she checks to make sure there's a clean uniform in the back seat for the next day. And then she falls asleep waiting for her paycheck to deposit overnight.
Alcantara-Anderson's wages jumped from $11.50 an hour in September 2018 to $14.75 today. After Disney's agreement with the unions last year to increase pay, no unionized Disney workers earn less than $13 an hour today compared to last year when nearly 21,000 people made less than $11.
But Alcantara-Anderson is still one of about 25,600 Disney workers in the union making less than $15 an hour. And life in the world's vacation kingdom is still a calculus of choices: rent, food, medicine, a birthday gift for her child.
She and her husband, who works at an auto repair shop, will make about $45,000 this year, wages that will also support her daughter and her sick mother. That lands them squarely in the low-wage bracket, according to guidelines from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
"We have no savings. We have no nest egg. We have nothing to fall back on," said Alcantara-Anderson, 28. "We pretty much live hand to mouth."
Orlando earned its place among the world's leading vacation spots after years of dizzying growth. Today, nearly 50 years after the Magic Kingdom opened, the region's 75 million visitors surpass London and Paris combined.
The tourism industry employs nearly 280,000 workers in the four counties surrounding Orlando, accounting for the largest portion of the entire local labor force, more than 20%. Disney employs more than a quarter of those workers or about 77,000 people.
So many tourism jobs in one place, many of them low-wage, come with a consequence: Paychecks across all industries in Central Florida rank dead last among the top 50 metropolitan areas in the United States.
