Disney VFX Workers File For Union Election

Walt Disney Pictures' VFX team filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday. As Motherboard notes, the filing "marks the second time in history that workers in the visual effects industry have announced their intent to organize -- the first being Marvel VFX workers, who did so three weeks prior." From the report: The Walt Disney Pictures workers, who are behind the visual effects in movies like the live-action Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean, plan to join the VFX Union, a new branch of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents much of the entertainment industry behind the scenes. Their filing comes after over 80 percent of the 18 in-house VFX crewmembers at Walt Disney Pictures in Los Angeles signed cards demonstrating their desire to unionize, according to a press release by the union.

"Today, courageous visual effects workers at Walt Disney Pictures overcame the fear and silence that have kept our community from having a voice on the job for decades," said Mark Patch, a IATSE VFX union organizer, in a statement. "With an overwhelming supermajority of these crews demanding an end to 'the way VFX has always been,' this is a clear sign that our campaign is not about one studio or corporation. It's about VFX workers across the industry using the tools at our disposal to uplift ourselves and forge a better path forward."

long history of gruelling work

[SamDaMan]

We used to call it Mousewitz.

They're gonna get it too

[rsilvergun]

the Biden Administration and the NLRB just ruled that if an employer is found to have interfered with a union drive in a meaningful way that the election will be cancelled and the employer must immediately recognize and bargain with the union. It basically makes union busting impossible.

Expect to see a *lot* more Unions. Which if you earn a living is good for you, since multiple studies show that even if you don't belong to one your wages went up because of 'em.

If higher wages caused inflation

[rsilvergun]

your granddad would never have earned enough money to have had you.

Seriously, have you ever asked yourself why it is our dad's and granddad's kept making more money every year, with higher standards of living, and it wasn't until our time that wages started to drop? What did they have they we didn't? It wasn't onions on the belt. They were bargaining from a position of strength. Strength in numbers.

Re:If higher wages caused inflation

[UMichEE]

Not trying to say that unions are all bad, but real wages started rising in the early 1800s before unions were much of a thing. And of course, big innovations like the 5-day/40 hour workweek are usually credited to the pre-unionized Ford.

Trying to claim that the decline in union membership since the 1970s led to real wage growth stalling is just a correlation. One could just as easily say that women entering the workforce, civil rights, globalization, proliferation of computers, or the growing popularity of avocados caused real wages to stall and find a nice chart that proves it. I could say that unions killed the American auto industry and point to a 75% decrease in employment at Ford (USA) over the last 50 years as proof, but you'll tell me that was globalization. Macroeconomics is a lot more complicated than just "unions solve all our problems" or "unions cause all our problems."

Re:

[Saffaya]

" Macroeconomics is a lot more complicated than just "unions solve all our problems" or "unions cause all our problems.""

However, it is as simple as "Nixon temporarily suspended the convertibilty of the dollar to gold"

This is just a back door way to destroy unions

[rsilvergun]

It's the classic just asking questions bullshit. It's not correlation to say that wages go up when people unionize it's hard scientific fact that has multiple studies backing it from multiple universities. But bottom line if unions didn't raise wages why would companies fight so hard to prevent people from unionizing?

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Look at European countries with high levels of union membership, like Germany and the Nordics.

Wages are good, especially at the lower end of the job market. Conditions are good. Lots of paid holiday and they mostly don't even have a concept of sick days, when you are ill you take time off to recover.

Re:

[nucrash]

Why not both?
I am of the belief that there were a number of factors at play including corruption in union leadership as well as the additional acceptance of additional workers combined with the shifting away from production and concept of manufacturing money through shady accounting which made people like Jack Welch millions while he gutted all the talent of GE. Others followed suite.
There was a perfect storm of variables to create the world we live in and many of those variables are in play which is shift

Re:

[whitroth]

100% bullshit. Real wages - adjusted for inflation - were NOT going up before unions. Unions, and socialists, pushed the 40 hour week.

And your claim that the right wing's full-scale war on unions (you're too young, I assume, to remember Raygun's war on the Air Traffic Controllers union) doesn't relate, sorry, that's bullshit also.

Prove it's not causation.

Re:

[UMichEE]

You could have just googled it. Don't dismiss without doing even a tiny bit of research...
https://academic.oup.com/oep/a... [oup.com]

Historians use pounds of wheat purchased by a day laborer's wages as a way to track "real wages" before we got sophisticated and complicated methods that we use today. It turns out that laborers in Babylon, Ancient Egypt, Rome, and early-modern England all earned about the same amount. You can see the chart in the book Farewell to Alms (link below). People disagree with the author's

Only because you could still find land

[rsilvergun]

so you could move when the 1%ers were screwing you over. By the 1900s that'd stopped because you couldn't just "go west". That's why Unions formed in the 1st place.

And no, it's not just correlation, it's been studied. A lot. Collective Bargaining raises everyone's wages. Including non-union, who benefit from higher union wages because of competition.

Re:

[alvinrod]

It frankly wouldn't matter how strong of a position they were bargaining from. Competing with dirt cheap foreign labor made them uncompetitive on cost. Unless you banned imports, consumers are going to pick the less costly option almost every time. Europe's recovery from WWII, more and more women entering the workforce, and increased globalization meant that there was always going to be a downturn.

Eventually China will industrialize to the point where labor for certain things starts flowing out of the co

Then you form voting blocks

[rsilvergun]

So that you don't have to compete with dirt cheap labor overseas. But even if we pretend that's not going to happen if the 1% could move every job overseas to slave labor they would have done it already. Every job here in America is here because it can't go anywhere else. Because at the end of the day every single CEO is going to prefer slave labor to working Americans earning good wages. But there's only so many jobs they can ship overseas before the whole system collapses. At least until they manage to in

Re:

[ravenshrike]

Because illegal immigration was kept comparatively low until the late 70s at which point it started to skyrocket. Indeed, after every period where the spigot of illegal immigration is restrained, wages and employment rates among the lower classes start to go up. And as soon as the spigot opens, wages and employment among the lower economic quartile of Americans plummets.

Re:

[Entrope]

Seriously, have you ever asked yourself why it is our dad's and granddad's kept making more money every year, with higher standards of living, and it wasn't until our time that wages started to drop?

No. For those who are unsure about the cause of this, see here [stlouisfed.org] and here [wikipedia.org]. Government is spending us into socialist-style stagnation.

More power to them

[vakuona]

However, they should be careful that a suddenly cost-conscious Disney (and Hollywood generally) doesn't just decide that they might as well outsource all VFX abroad. VFX artists are not selling their "personal" brands like most actors - they provide a very specific service that can very well be outsourced.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

It's surprising that it isn't already outsourced overseas.

Many of the pre-computer cartoons were animated by human artists in Asia. Some of them were even done in North Korea [wikipedia.org]. You can't find cheaper labor than that.

Re: More power to them

[spitzak]

No it was not outsourced to NK. The article you quote says NK tried to make is own animation and actually needed help from SK to do it.

Re:

[Voyager529]

However, they should be careful that a suddenly cost-conscious Disney (and Hollywood generally) doesn't just decide that they might as well outsource all VFX abroad. VFX artists are not selling their "personal" brands like most actors - they provide a very specific service that can very well be outsourced.

Well, there are going to be a few things that make it questionable as to whether Disney would wholly outsource their VFX department.

First, there may be a need for certain things to be re-shot to make a visual effect work right. coordinating a VFX team, a film crew, and actors/costume/stylists is hard enough, but doing that with an *offshore* team sounds like a headache for everyone. If the offshore team requires multiple re-shoots and Disney has to pay SAG rates for all of those re-shoots, it'd probably end

Re:

[vakuona]

There are ways of offshore the work while keeping control of the outputs e.g. by ensuring that the workstations that your VFX workers use do not allow for removal of the material.

And Disney doesn't have to completely outsource - they could just establish a VFX team abroad.

Re: More power to them

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Are you under the impression that Disney is waiting to be betrayed before they even consider outsourcing the work to cheaper countries? Heh

Btw overseas vfx wages have been rising globally,

Re:

[njen]

The workers specifically cited in TFA are the on-set VFX team, they can not be outsourced.

Re:

[DrXym]

The danger in outsourcing is you usually get shoddy work in return. Doesn't matter if we're talking VFX, video games, call center support or anything else. What you save on the one hand you lose on the other by devaluing your product or brand.

That's nice.

[RightwingNutjob]

Now those 18 vfxers will have to split the cost of union representation among themselves.

Re:

[whitroth]

Oh, whoop-de-fucking-do. Another wrong winger who thinks union dues beggar you. Here, since you're too much an idiologue to ever having made sure of your argument, I looked it up for you... and union dues work out to be 1% - 2% of union wages.

Right, that breaks you?