Two Disney workers have sued the company after it asked them to relocate from California and be based at a new Florida campus — which it later canceled.
Last May, Disney scrapped plans to build the nearly $1 billion campus in Lake Nona, Orlando. The company was on a cost-cutting spree after Bob Iger returned as CEO. Simultaneously, Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had locked horns over a Florida law that limited what public schools could teach about gender identity and sexual orientation.
About 2,000 jobs, mainly in the company’s parks, experiences, and products division, were set to move from one of its offices in Glendale, Southern California, to the new campus, which had been in the works since 2019.
At least 200 employees had already relocated to Florida before the project was canceled, Disney chairman Josh D’Amaro told employees in an internal email last May.
Two of these workers have now sued Disney for damages.
Maria De La Cruz, a vice president of product design, and George Fong, a creative director of product design, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the entertainment and theme park giant on Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court.
Disney told them in August 2021 that their roles would move to the Lake Nona campus and “made it clear” that they would lose their jobs if they refused to relocate, the lawsuit said. It added that the workers were given three months to make their decision.
De La Cruz and Fong told Disney in November 2021 that they would relocate to the new campus, and both sold their homes in California and bought new homes in Orlando, the lawsuit alleged. It said that in Fong’s case, he had to sell the family home he’d grown up in.
In June 2022, Disney told workers that the deadline to relocate to Florida had been pushed back to 2026 because the project’s completion had been delayed, the lawsuit said. After relocating to Florida, De La Cruz and Fong worked from Disney’s Kissimmee campus, the lawsuit added.
But then, in May 2023, Disney told employees that the Lake Nona project was canceled. The lawsuit said they had until the end of 2023 to decide whether to remain in Florida, and that if they wanted to return to Disney’s California offices, they would have to relocate by the end of 2024.
The lawsuit said De La Cruz and Fong decided to return to California because they thought it was important for their job security, though De La Cruz has yet to relocate.
By this point, though, the real-estate markets had changed. House prices near Lake Nona slumped after Disney canceled the project.
Meanwhile, increases in mortgage rates and house prices in Los Angeles made it “impossible” for Disney workers to buy homes in the Los Angeles area that were comparable to the homes they’d sold there just a year or two beforehand, the lawsuit said.
Fong has moved to a “significantly” smaller house, the lawsuit added.
The lawsuit accuses Disney of “solicitation of employee by misrepresentation, intentional misrepresentation, concealment, and negligent misrepresentation.” It claims that Disney made untrue statements about the Lake Nona campus to workers to induce workers to relocate.
Disney did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Correction: June 24, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated Ron DeSantis’s title. He is the governor of Florida, not a senator.
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