Disney Employees Threaten “Long-Term Harm,” Stand Against Return to Office Order

It was shortly after his return to the CEO position that Bob Iger announced that employees of The Walt Disney Company would be returning to the office, and the day of reckoning is fast approaching.

We at Disney Fantatic previously reported that on March 1, all hybrid employees would be required to work at the office four days a week.

“In a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together,” Iger said in a letter to employees. “It is my belief that working together more in-person will benefit the Company’s creativity, culture, and our employees’ careers.”

Read More: Bob Iger Issues Company-Wide Return to Office Announcement, Employees Feel Antagonized

But those employees have grown accustomed to the newfound emancipation remote work has given them from the confines of corporate offices and are not about to go back easily, even going so far as to threaten resignations and “long-term harm” to The Walt Disney Company.

According to The Washington Post, 

“More than 2,300 employees signed the petition asking CEO Bob Iger to reconsider the mandate, which ranks among the strictest for big companies in the post-pandemic era, arguing that it is ‘likely to have unintended consequences that cause long-term harm to the company.'”

The employees also claim the new policy will “forced resignations among some of our most hard-to-replace talent and vulnerable communities” as well as result in “dramatically reducing productivity, output, and efficiency.”

At the same time, though, Iger has also announced plans to cut Disney’s corporate workforce by 7,000 jobs, and one has to wonder if remote worker walkouts due to a refusal to return to the office will relieve the Disney CEO and other lower-level Disney leaders of the need to fire as many people as was originally quoted.

Related: Here’s How Disney’s Layoffs Are Going to Affect the Disney Parks

“This is a standoff, like an old-fashioned cowboy standoff right now,” Laurie Ruettimann, a human resources consultant in Raleigh, N.C., told The Post. “I would not dare workers to choose between returning to the office and their jobs, because they may learn to live with a little less in the long- term.”

At the time of this article’s original publication, there has been no comment from The Walt Disney Company on this petition, and only time will tell just how many of the Disney family’s hybrid workers will reject the call back home.