Labor Coalition in Minnesota Demands Disney Contractor Pay Prisoners Minimum Wage
A group of prison laborers and unions in Minnesota are demanding that Anagram International, LLC, a Minnesota-based balloon company that subcontracts with Disney, pay incarcerated workers $11.13 an hour, which is the state’s minimum wage (The current wage for these workers is only 90 cents per hour). At a press conference, a former incarcerated Anagram laborer and member of the labor coalition–which is led by the organization End Slavery in Minnesota–highlighted that he would often have to “[choose between soap and a ten-minute phone call to a loved one” due to the low wages.
Thao Xiong, another former prison worker for Anagram who was incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Faribault, described folding life-sized, Disney-themed balloons on an assembly. It often took multiple workers to fold a single balloon, he told Workday Magazine. After being released, Xiong, who worked for Anagram for years while locked up, applied multiple times to work at an Anagram factory in St. Paul but “never got a job, never even a response.”
Yet another formerly imprisoned Anagram worker, Darla Holland, noted that the balloons she and others folded would have been too expensive for them to buy with their wage. Folded in the shape of Disney characters like Elsa and Olaf from Frozen or Minnie and Mickey Mouse, the balloons can sell for $45 each. “I vividly remember folding these balloons and how I couldn’t buy [a balloon] for my kids,” Holland said.
At the same press conference, coalition members pointed out that, in August 2025, private prison profiteer GEO Group was found by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to be in violation of Washington’s minimum wage ordinance and is now forced to pay more than $23 million in back wages and penalties to the state. [See: Ugochukwu Nwauzor, et al v. The GEO Group, Inc., No. 21-36024 (9th Cir. 2025); See also: PLN, Dec. 2021, p. 26]. While that case centered on the GEO Group paying detained immigrants as little as $1 per day for work like cooking, doing laundry, and washing dishes, the ruling signals a potential legal pathway for the coalition to pursue.
Sources: Workday Magazine, Washington State Standard
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Related legal case
Ugochukwu Nwauzor, et al v. The GEO Group, Inc.
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | No. 21-36024 (9th Cir. 2025) |
| Level | Court of Appeals |