I wholeheartedly agree it made sense in the past. Back then the only choice in labor was manual labor and there wasn't any way for the ones running the companies to get around that and unions made it so they have to give out some kinda reward.
But today it isn't even a case of college and all that, Unions are pretty well dead along with the collective bargaining they provided on the large scale and globalization and automation has ensured that there is more than enough in the labor market to cover what is needed with a surplus.
Now, the workers have next to zero power against the employers who don't care about rewarding hard work or employee loyalty. Busting your ass does still apply in a sense though, it is decent individual level advice and does work as such a great deal of the time, it just makes for horrible policy setting as the more it is applied the worse the outcome becomes for the group as a whole without any protections. It is one of those things where you bring yourself up by lowering the top end for everyone in the pool if that makes any sense (Not sure the best analogy to give for that one)
As for the Disney case, from what I have read they were trying to replace them with a private company who operated off import labor. And I can think of a great way to prevent them from doing that, get rid of import workers or making it EXCEEDINGLY hard to get one so they have to hire local.
AFK