Welcome to Theme Park Insider! Join the community or log in
Theme Park Insider
Facebook Twitter Pinterest YouTube

Walt Disney Co. cuts 1,900 theme park jobs over the past six weeks

By Domenik Jost
Published: April 5, 2009 at 9:58 AM
We've seen theme parks all around cut jobs, some going bankrupt, others just re-organizing. This time it's the Walt Disney Company.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, the Walt Disney Co. acknowledged Friday that it had cut 1,900 jobs in 6 weeks, including 1,400 in Florida alone. This makes for the largest amount of job cuts since Disney cut between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs in Orlando during spring 2001. Disney is Central Florida's largest employer and is said to have had about 62,000 local employees before the recent cuts.

Readers' Opinions

From TH Creative on April 5, 2009 at 2:14 PM
Kinda sorta. Several hundred of the job cuts were open positions. Meaning there were like 700 job openings that Disney decided they were not gonna fill.
From Raymond Sydowski on April 5, 2009 at 3:19 PM
Well, that's unfortunate. I'm sad to see it.

It's my firm hope that quality will not suffer, but I don't know if that's unavoidable.

From TH Creative on April 5, 2009 at 4:03 PM
Keep in mind the jobs that have been axed are all back of house positions. Not on stage stuff.
From Derek Potter on April 5, 2009 at 5:31 PM
Any show manager will tell you, backstage positions are pretty important. Now more people get to work harder for the same low wage this summer. 62,000 seems a bit much, even for a complex the size of Disney. Maybe that's the number during peak season, and I'm thinking that they keep a lot of part time staff as well instead of a lesser number of full timers in order to prevent overtime and such.
From Anthony Murphy on April 5, 2009 at 9:15 PM
Its the best of times
Its the worst of times


Not a suprise that Disney follows suit with many other companies out there.Sad though!

From Charles Reichley on April 5, 2009 at 11:10 PM
OK, I have no real plans to ever go to Disney, although we do talk about it. But I decided, on a whim, to look at the "free meal plan" offer which is being advertised on either side of this entry.

And when I get to the Disney site, and attempt to go through the process to see how much it would end up costing for my particular family situation, the site is DOWN, so I can't look at or book the package being offered:

"System Unavailable"

"Sorry, this special offer package is temporarily unavailable because our vacation package reservation system is undergoing maintenance."

OK, so it is 2am on a monday morning. But if you are suffering from a loss of income, you really want to keep your reservation system running 24/7.

From Don Neal on April 6, 2009 at 5:23 AM
It is impossible to keep any system truly 24/7 and most maintenance windows are from 2 am to 6 am on systems that service the amount of people Disney does. So I don't see that as too out of the ordinary.

This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.

More Theme Park News

Previous article: Many openings at theme parks this weekend

April 2009 Archive