Disney Looks for the Union Label : Worker Gets an Earful

Betty Findley says she didn’t necessarily intend to defy the powers that be at the Magic Kingdom. All she wanted to do was demonstrate the fact that she is, as she simply puts it, “union.”

But to keep both her pride and the Walt Disney Co.’s dress code intact, the 50-year-old grandmother and a waitress for 13 years at the Disneyland Hotel’s Monorail Cafe knew she would have to use a little ingenuity.

To get around a section of the code that prohibits employees from wearing “unauthorized insignia, pins and buttons” while on the job, Findley had union lapel pins made into earrings.

With a little modification by a jeweler, the pins were reduced to custom-made ear bobs, which she believes conform to a section of the dress code that lets workers wear non-dangling earrings as long they are “no larger than a dime.”

Joe Aguirre, a representative of the hotel, said Wednesday that Findley’s loophole isn’t big enough and the earrings are still unauthorized because they are “insignia.” Aguirre insisted that Findley was recently told not to wear the earrings and has complied.

Findley, however, says she has received no such directive and has been sporting the earrings at work for more than a week.

“They tried to stop her from wearing one pin and now she’s wearing two,” chuckled Steven Beyer of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, Local 681, which represents Findley and other Disney workers. “It’s a case of an individual outsmarting a company.”

Findley’s rebellion comes at a time when the union and the hotel are locked in battle. Union pins were banned by the dress code, which Disney imposed on all employees last year. (While the hotel is across West Street from the famous Anaheim amusement park billed as “The Happiest Place on Earth,” Disney joined with a Hong Kong firm last year and bought the 1,174-room facility from the Wrather Corp.)

The dress code immediately angered some hotel employes because it also prohibited men from wearing beards and mustaches. At least three workers were fired or suspended after they refused to shave, but all eventually reached monetary settlements with the hotel.

Beyer said the union relented on the facial-hair issue, based on the wishes of the majority of its membership. But the membership, he said, “is not flexible” on the pins.

“We represent 16,000 people and there is no other employer in our jurisdiction that does not permit its employes to wear union service pins.”

The pins commemorate an individual’s years of union membership.

Findley said she wore her pin openly on the front of her blouse after the ban was announced but was not challenged until after a recent National Labor Relations Board hearing at which she disclosed that fact.

“The food and beverage man (at the hotel) came over a week later and said, ‘What’s that you’re wearing? Oh, you can’t wear that,’ ” she related.

Aguirre said the code is not aimed at union pins specifically but rather seeks to maintain a uniform look among company employees.

The dispute is being reviewed by a federal arbitrator for the NLRB.

Findley, a steward with the union, said her supervisors “won’t even come in to look at me now.”

“Someone told me that one of them said, ‘I can’t believe that Betty would do this.’ My response to that is, ‘Look, it’s nothing personal. I’m proud of my union and I want to wear my pin.’ ”