So I thought I would wake up in a better mood about this, but I'm not.
And something that was burning me up about it is the complaint that SEAS furloughed without benefits. Well, continuing to pay benefits isn't a requirement of furlough, and depending on what benefits are like could cost an employee more than what they could get if the company keeps the current setup.
Also, just doing some simple math:
SeaWorld had $1.4 billion in revenue last year and employed 4,300 full-time and 11,000 part-time workers.
Like other theme parks across the U.S., SeaWorld closed the gates to its parks in mid-March in response to the spreading coronavirus. Since closing to the public, SeaWorld is losing on average $25 million a month, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ok so lets start with the employed part:
~ 11,000 part time employees. Part time employees generally don't get health benefits. And not to sound harsh, but some of these people might be better off for a variety of reasons. First off when talking about how to keep them on the payroll, what's deemed "fair"? Pay them based on average hours a week on a certain time period? Just pay everyone a flat rate? What if this person had another part time job that needs them to be working more hours, that doesn't seem right to SEAS to have to pay them anyways. Let's say it's a BGW employee that was part time, if they qualify for unemployment, could be getting $378+600 per week for $978 a week. What's the likelihood they made that anyways.
~ 4,300 full time employees. We do know that animal care staff and upper management was kept. I would imagine some other departments had a few people kept around as well. But again what we
don't know the pay structure or anything of the people that were laid off. SEAS could have gone through and targeted people/departments who aren't needed at this time, who would make more filing unemployment than getting their paycheck.
~ So if there's 15,300 employees, that's 14,535 employees laid off. So if we assume that's all 11,000 part time employees (reasonable), that's 3,535 full time employees laid off. Comparatively, Disney furloughed 43,000 of 77,000 employees (about 56% of it's work force), with the union not saying how many were full time or part time. So who knows what theirs look like. Anyways back to the SEAS part of this, that left about 800 people still on payroll with benefits, where
this article points to only 200 workers at WDW being deemed "essential workers".
~ I highlighted the other part there. Lets talk about the income part. SEAS doesn't have any other source of income. So right now that's effectively $0 (before someone says they are still collecting on EZ-Pay, I would bet at this point it's such a small amount it doesn't really matter). They aren't bringing any money in, but they would still be spending. So let's just make some assumptions here; $17/hr (about the average for PT work at SEAS) and about 15 hours per week (PT is considered 30 hours or less so this accounts for the 1 shift a week and pushing the 30 hour a week envelope), that's paying an average of $255/wk, $2.8 million a week, and $11.2million in a month (that was their basis of 1 month before Disney furloughed) And if we assume all the full time are salary, $600/wk, is another $2.1 mil a week, that's $8.4 mil for the month. So a company bringing in $0 right now was supposed to spend an additional (guesstimate) $19.6mil on top of the $25mil a month.
~ Based on SEAS projections they can make it into 2021 without opening. So let's say that's 18 months from now. That's $450 million that SEAS is losing if they are closed that long. If they kept employees on longer, that number can go to $500+ million easily, taking down how long they could survive without opening gates from 18 months to 12 months possibly, meaning those 14,000 jobs won't be temporarily lost, but possibly permanently lost.
Lastly, just because I was curious, I looked up UNITE HERE. First off they had a huge membership hit in 2008 (Great Recession) and are not gaining many members back (they went from 460,000 members in 08 to 235,000 in 2009 and are at about 255,000 now) and are not funding well either (financially they took the hit in mid-09 and are still about 1/3 of their value pre-GR). So they are "struggling" themselves. Second their predominate membership is hotel workers, food service workers, laundry, warehouse, and casino workers. SEAS employs such a small percentage of those industries anyways, especially compared to Disney who owns their resorts and on property restaurants. They have a big presence of this union because of those things. So I feel as though this union bringing up these issues feels like someone from the outside looking in complaining about what happened.
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