Disney‘s now-abandoned Florida relocation plan for staffers has created some pretty dark legal skies.
More than a year after the once again Bob Iger-run Disney dropped its Bob Chapek-era initiative to consolidate some California operations and employees in a new campus in Orlando’s Lake Nona area, a current VP of Product Design and a director of Product Design are taking the company to court in a potential class action.
“As a result of relying on the statements relating to the Lake Nona project, and Disney’s failure to share the concealed facts, Plaintiffs, and all similarly situated employees, experienced various harms including losses relating to selling their homes in California, purchasing new homes in Florida, and other expenses and damages related to unnecessarily moving across the country,” reads the jury-seeking complaint (read it here) filed Wednesday night in Los Angeles Superior Court by Disney staffers Maria De La Cruz and George Fong.
Casting aside its 2021 proclamations of “Florida’s business-friendly climate, the state’s generous $500 million tax credit offer and Chapek’s idea of an amalgamation of resources, Disney pulled the plug on the ambitious $1 billion and more Lake Nona project in May 2023. The death knell was a consequence of the company’s now concluded legal battle with onetime presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis over his Don’t Say Gay law, so-called woke corporate polices and bureaucratic control of the area around Disney World.
With the relocation already push back once before to 2026, the real-world fallout of the battle of the political and C-suite titans shattered the lives of the people in the middle, the lawsuit claims.
“Plaintiffs, and similarly situated employees, would not have suffered these damages but for Disney’s false representations,” the four-claim misrepresentation filing adds. “Plaintiffs, and similarly situated employees’ reliance on Disney’s representations therefore was a substantial factor in causing these harms.”
The plaintiffs are seeking a class action certification that could end up including more than 250 Disney employees. Fong and De La Cruz also are seeking a variety of unspecified damages.
No doubt in part to the Juneteenth holiday, Disney reps did not return a request for comment from Deadline on the proposed class action.
What the filing from San Francisco attorneys Jason S. Lohr and Roberto G. Ripamonti does express is a process of hurry up and wait that saw the likes of Fong selling their childhood home in the Golden State to move to Florida for a corporate promise of “brand-new state-of-the-art campus” that never came true.
Add to that, the collapse of home prices in Lake Nona after Disney decided not to move thousands of employees there, plus the surge in “mortgage rates,” California home prices, and other cost of living issues between the summer of 2022 and the summer of 2023 left many Disney staffers like De La Cruz and Fong holding Florida homes they were having a hard time selling and looking at California homes they could now not afford.
“The unfortunate irony is that the employees most harmed were Disney’s most loyal employees,” Lohr told Deadline today. “Disney needs to make this right for their best and most loyal employees.”
And, as had happened when the move to Florida was announced in 2021, there was once again the fear that people could lose their jobs if they didn’t shuffle back to the West Coast in a timely fashion.
“On or around May 18, 2023, Disney communicated to Plaintiffs and other similarly situated individuals that they had until the end of 2023 to decide whether or not to remain in Florida,” the potential class action asserts. “Those choosing not to remain in Florida would have until the end of 2024 to physically relocate to California to work in Disney’s California offices.”
It should be noted that while Disney HR’s Tami Garcia of Disney Human Resources emailed those affected in late May 2023 that “we truly regret the disruption you’ve all faced due to this initiative,” the payout the company offered “did not compensate …fairly” the new suit says.
Hence, Tuesday’s class action.