Businessweek Extra-Abigail Disney

gave a Ted talk earlier this month. It's all about really talking to corporations to offer respect, dignity, and a living wage to everyone who works for them, starting with the company that bears her name, Abigail Disney. She's a documentary filmmaker at Fork Films. She talked to us about

a worker first era that she hopes is dawning. I think there needs to be a kind of a mindset reset um because I think that most people running companies right now, we're in business school maybe twenty five weeks. They're only doing what they were sort of taught to do, which is to maximize shareholder values, please every penny out of the structure of the company me that they possibly could,

and that has squeezed workers dramatically. It's so interesting to watch right now as we talk about, for instance, I just heard a piece today about who's the front line worker? When we get the textine, who do we include a the front line worker? And they were saying, of course, the people who clean the floors, the people who clean up the rooms when the people leave hospitals are front line workers because they're just as important as the doctors

in the nurses. So, you know, we have for a long time kind of pretended as though those were sort of nameless, faceless, interchangeable people who didn't really deserve a livable wage. We need to completely reset our sensibilities about that. If we're not willing to clean the toilets ourselves, but someone who's got to do it for us, and we can't run a business with us. And so where does this conversation not just start, Abigail, but where does it

need to continue? Because I feel like there's more and more lip service being paid to this. What does action look like? Yeah, that's really the that's the question of all questions. I hope and pray um and I'm putting a lot of faith in the basic goodness of the people who run companies and the CEOs and the board members.

I am hoping that if you appeal enough to their consciences that they will start to feel a discomfort with the way things are because the clear, clear, factive matter is right now, what we do is not more leaky well, And you know, it is interesting because I do think there are a lot of CEOs that we have talked to that seem to be more understanding of their employee base and more sympathetic to the plights of those that are just barely you know, getting by at this point.

But I do wonder as long as there is still kind of news organizations like ours that you know, track companies and we watch those quarterly earnings, and there's investors in the marketplace, activists or others like yourself, you know, who will put pressure on companies, um activists in other ways to make sure that they can financially, you know,

kind of do as much as they can. I mean, I don't know how does it really get much better, especially when you look at the gaps sometimes between what a CEO has made and what kind of the bulk of workers are paid at companies right right, and that you know that is that is such a great temperature games a barometer of of what's going on in the company because I frankly feel like if I'm taking home, you know, many thousands of times what my medium worker takes,

I am going to have a hard time sleeping at night. If I also know, at the same time I'm profitable and many of my workers can't put food on the table, there's something should go off in a person's heart and mind, the conscience, and so you know, what I'm talking about is a little bit of gushy touched, you know, kind of lu lu thing, which is a mindset shift because actually, if you look over the last fifty years what changed in American business, most of it wasn't policy. Most of

it was mindset shifting and norms changing. And so you know, in in nine two, it became legal, for instance, to make a share buy back um because up until that point it was considered totally unethical. Worker first, Abigail. In some ways it is a holistic idea. In many ways it is about just fear treatment. But it really and I want to take us back to something we talked about a little bit before we went to some news. I mean, this is ultimately about sharing compensation and really

sort of driving that deeper into the company. This is doable. It is totally doable. I mean, you know, we're Disney is a totally different place this year than it was last year. But but let's look at it from last year. It made eleven and a half billion dollars of share buy backs in and unless people still not consistently able to put food on the table, was completely possible without affecting their profitability. It would have affected the enormity of profits,

but it wouldn't have caused them to be unprofitable. To ensure that some of those profits were shared with the people who caused them to happen. You know, if the janitor is not making that sidewalk absolutely clean, then Disney isn't Disney. They give They bring value to the company, no matter how lonely you might think their job is. So why aren't more companies doing this and the go ahead?

I think that the shareholder crimacy story was a story that took hold so quickly and so absolutely in in part because I think governments UM in the eighties and the nineties, both Quentin and and Reagan absorbed this idea that the that the Cheryl the premacy story and the kind of let business first UM way of understanding politics and life, um was just absorbed with such unanimity that I think we've forgot to question and remember that things

did not always work that way. I mean, I think it's sometimes it happens that you forget that you're thinking of an orthodoxy when you think of things and not totally looking at all the options. So I think it's a lack of imagination. Frankly, well and and Abigail, you know, one might argue, I might argue in fact that candidly, just doing it by the numbers is easier, you know

what I mean. It's like, if you've got this goal of like the only way you're measured is by your share price or your body online, your EPs, that's easy. To measure someone's health and well being and happiness that's harder to do in in many ways, it's harder, right, right, right? And isn't it interesting? I mean because it isn't Disney in the business of someone's happiness? Um, so it should

be something they're they're they're paying attention to. And the irony of what's going on with workers there is really hitting I think their customer base really hard. That is not a brand that will live forever unless they really pay attention to what is eloding there when they treat the workers the way they do. So, you know, Notlton Freedmen came in nice and seveny he said what he

said people just uh absorbed, almost without question. And one of the things he was saying in in that, in that piece and in all that he taught us afterwards, was if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. And that was I think maybe one of the most fatal blows to the corporate imagination because and and Disney such a great company, look at that for because everything that makes them profitable is an ineffable paying off the imagination. It can't be measured by nature, and so you cannot

wrestle everything into a mathematical equation. And and that's business has to make sense things. And that was Abigail Disney, documentary filmmaker at Fork Films. She's been a loud voice of patriotic millionaire. She's got some takes, Carol, that's for sure. She certainly does. You've been listening to Blueberg Business Week Extra. I'm Jason Kelly and I'm Carol Master. This is Bomber