A lawsuit seeks damages for Disney employees who moved from California to Florida after the company told them they were being transferred — and then backtracked.

Walt Disney Co. continues to face fallout from its scuttled plans to move 2,000 California employees to a proposed Florida campus — a controversial decision the company reversed last year following the return of Chief Executive Bob Iger.

In 2021, then-CEO Bob Chapek and parks and experiences Chairman Josh D’Amaroannounced plans to relocate employees supporting Disney theme parks and resorts — including the celebrated Imagineers — to a planned $1-billion office park in the Lake Nona area of Orlando, Fla. The move was designed for Disney to take advantage of Florida tax credits, but the cross-country shift was deeply unpopular among employees who were asked to uproot their lives in Southern California.

Now some Disney employees are suing the company over the canceled relocation.

According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday against Disney in Los Angeles County Superior Court, numerous workers heeded the company’s calls, dutifully sold their homes in the Los Angeles area and moved to Central Florida.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    77·
    5 months ago

    Imagine selling a house in Los Angeles in 2021, and then trying to buy a comparable house back today. That’s potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of detrimental reliance due to inflation, let alone all the other moving and transaction costs.

    Edit:

    “Mr. Fong also sold his home, which was a particularly painful decision because it was the family home he had grown up in and inherited,” the lawsuit said. Fong is a creative director of product design; his family home was in Los Angeles.

    The judge ought to force Disney to pay enough for Mr. Fong to buy back his specific home – not just a “comparable” one – regardless of how much the new owners want for it.

    • Thunderbird4@lemmy.world
      25·
      5 months ago

      In my limited understanding of California property taxes, I believe property values are only reassessed on the sale of the property, so if he was living in a house deeded to him by his parents, he might have been paying taxes on a decades-old appraisal. So even if they bought his exact house back for him, he’d still be stuck with significantly higher taxes, which he’d have to fight to be compensated for as well.

    • Feliskatos 🐱@lemmy.world
      15·
      5 months ago

      The value of knowing your neighbors is essentially priceless. Moving from a childhood home into a new neighborhood puts one in a new community of complete strangers, from which it can take decades to develop new neighborly relationships.