Marvel's VFX Workers Vote to Unionize in Historic Landslide Victory (rollingstone.com) 51
Visual effects workers at Marvel Studios have unanimously voted to unionize with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, marking a historic milestone for the industry. Rolling Stone reports: Following the successful vote with the NLRB, Marvel's VFX union will now enter into collective bargaining negotiations with Marvel. A start date for those negotiations hasn't been announced yet. Underpinning the union drive were the poor working conditions visual effects professionals have endured on Marvel productions, including a lack of pay equity, grueling hours, understaffing, excessive requests for changes, and unfair turnaround times.
VFX crews have been a crucial part of film and TV productions since the introduction of visual effects in the first Star Wars films of the 1970s. But while many other backstage/behind-the-scenes crews and professions (such as production designers, editors, lighting, make-up, and props) have long been unionized under the IATSE umbrella, VFX workers largely remained non-union.
VFX crews have been a crucial part of film and TV productions since the introduction of visual effects in the first Star Wars films of the 1970s. But while many other backstage/behind-the-scenes crews and professions (such as production designers, editors, lighting, make-up, and props) have long been unionized under the IATSE umbrella, VFX workers largely remained non-union.
What good is a union (Score:4)
when everybody loses their jobs to AI in a not-too-distant future?
If anything, it'll incentivize whoever wants to get rid of them to get rid of them faster. It's sad but true: unions only work when the unionized workers have something the employer needs that it can't get anywhere else. This will soon not be the case anymore here.
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maybe it's time to lower full time to 32 hours right away and slowly lower down to 20-25 down the road
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This sounds great on paper, but it's going to make things more expensive for the
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I have only been working for 40 - odd years though.
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Someone has never worked a job with a time tracking system. Many of my white collar office jobs came with an expectation of 80% time billable, 32 hours a week is the absolute minimum, and it'd be a rare week where you actually end at 40 total hours worked. Don't worry about extra money either, you're salaried, unless of course you somehow manage to log less than 40, in which case we'll pull it out of your PTO bank. Best be reachable 24/7 too.
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Voucher Cloud determined that the average office worker is only productive for two hours and 23 minutes each day.
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Those workers are not functioning under a regime where you have to account for time worked. You can fudge time to an extent, it didn't actually take 15 minutes to assist that user with a password reset, but you can't fudge it enough to inflate 2.5 hours into 6.
It's worse for lawyers than IT people. Ever talk to an associate at a law firm? Their starting expectation is to bill 2,000 hours a year. 40 * 52 = 2,080 hours, assuming no days off, and discounting the very obvious fact that a decent chunk of
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There is a lot of busywork that you can be doing that's "billable" but not "productive". Associates at law firms are working to be partner, it's a lot of sacrifice but the payoffs are there whether you want to become a judge or stay a lawyer, these people don't have to worry about work after 40.
Beyond that, lawyers usually work multiple similar cases, a lot of case work can be billed multiple times, IT workers in MSP do the same (eg. I can write an Ansible script generic enough to apply to the issues of n c
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You and I differ on this. I frankly don't think what the legal profession does should be legal. It's one thing to occasionally need overtime from salaried/exempt folks. If your entire business model and/or profession depends on people routinely working 50, 60, 70+ hours a week, you're fucking doing it wrong. They'd never do it if they had to pay the associates time and a half. If that was a thing you can bet money they'd figure out a way to change workflows, hire more people, or both.
The medical profe
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I know there are many ways of skinning the same cat, I'm just telling you why.
I've been to plenty of court hearings for various reasons, both personal and professional. You sit in the "waiting room" for 4-6 hours before your case comes up. Your attorney has to be present, you are being billed for that time, your attorney also has a briefcase and a laptop which he'll reserve a meeting room for and start doing his work.
MSPs are a lot like that, Dell contracts people to repair servers etc, they come, they baby
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Your lawyers have interesting morals if they are double billing like that. I’ve likewise attended court hearings, civil and criminal, and my lawyers never billed me for time spent working for a different client. The criminal lawyer took a few phone calls for other clients while we waited and that time was excluded from my bill. Out of six hours at the courthouse (mostly spent waiting as you say) I was billed for four. One of the two excluded hours was lunch, which he took WITH ME, so conceivably b
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Almost no one in an office is working the full 8 hours a day they're supposedly getting laid for.
What kind of office jobs are you talking about? Sign me up!
working at kruger industrial smoothing (Score:2)
kruger industrial smoothing
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WTF are you drinking? 32 hours? Name one medium or larger company where it's under 40. No, scratch that, where they have never said "whatever it takes".
A *hell* of a lot of places are 50 or 60 hours a week - and I suppose you pretend that responding to calls and texts and emails from work shouldn't count.
And CGI companies, and game companies? You haven't paid any attention to the people screaming about 70 and 80 hour weeks?
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Re: What good is a union (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what the UAW seems to be demanding. Which is odd too because they hate EVs because it means less work for them, which is...exactly what they're demanding... Though given the shitty work that UAW members do, it's no wonder their demands make no sense, and it's no wonder they keep electing corrupt bosses.
No joke, if you want a car assembled in America that lasts worth a shit and needs very little maintenance, then any of the brands not assembled by UAW members should do the trick, like say Toyota and Lexus.
Then look at the brands with the most UAW representation, like GM, Dodge and Ford... I honestly don't know who is digging Detroit's grave faster, the car companies or UAW? If UAW gets its way, they'll fall way behind on EV production, which means they'll be dead in 10 years. But that's what you get when you're stuck with an incompetent union full of incompetent workers.
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Have any evidence for your long-debunked anti-union bullshit?
I didn't think so.
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Yeah I do.
I'm not top of the pile now, but one day I will be and then I'll be the screwer not the screwee. How else am I meant to get super rich with this union bullshit? It's theft, stealing the American dream and probably a handful of amendments too. Like the 5th or 2nd or something, you know, the important ones.
Re: What good is a union (Score:2)
Sure, I can prove all of it. Which bit in particular are you wondering about? If it's brand reliability, see consumer reports. If it's UAW's hate for EVs, just ask them, they'll tell you exactly that and how they're lobbying the Biden admin to lift the EV mandate and subsidies, and they'll also tell you how they're lobbying for a 32 hour work week. Want to know about corrupt UAW leaders? Google it, it ain't hard.
The irony that they hate EVs for their reduced labor needs while also demanding reduced labor ou
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Sure, I can prove all of it.
The evidence suggests otherwise. You've had two opportunities so far, and haven't even tried to support your nonsense claims.
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Which evidence? You've provided none yourself. I'll tell you what, you can find exactly what I'm saying from the UAW themselves:
https://uaw.org/wp-content/upl... [uaw.org]
If you look towards the bottom, they specifically note that anything not listed on that page is non-UAW made even if made in the US. And of course on their website they specifically list a few excluded brands:
https://region1.uaw.org/member... [uaw.org]
Now here's a link to CR that lists all car brands by reliability:
https://www.consumerreports.or... [consumerreports.org]
Though give
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You must be really stupid. Do you even understand the claims you made?
Nothing you posted supports your nonsense. Unbelievable...
Re: What good is a union (Score:2)
Says the guy who claims "evidence" to the contrary while providing none. I asked you earlier to be specific, and you still haven't done that, instead you're just being deliberately vague to weasel out of it.
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And that's union workers fault. Right. And the fact that the execs order things built with planned obsolescence? And order things changed every year?*
You're an ignorant slut, James.
* in the early eighties, a relative who worked for a car dealership in a small town told me he was spending $3000-$4000 a *year* (in 1980's dollars) for "special service tools" for transmissions. Explain why he needed new ones every year....
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Why hire one full time worker when you can hire two part time workers for only 3 times as much?
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And at least they will be laid off with a retirement package and some other benefits they can use later in life.
True that. I didn't consider that angle but it makes a lot of sense.
Re:What good is a union (Score:4, Interesting)
This makes the assumption that if they don't unionize the studio isn't going to just try and replace them with AI anyways, which from the behavior of people like David Zaslav is pretty likely.
Also let's get a grip on what AI can do and what's involved in cinema quality VFX productions. People can already spot suspect VFX work with the effort put in today and AI still has telltale markers all over it especially when it comes to moving video. AI is still going to follow an 80/20 rule, it's probably gotten to the 80% already but it will be a long ways for it to hit the level of detail a real CFX team can do for that last 20% and that last 20% can make or break how an audience views your film.
Not to mention there is already a strong public sentiment against AI in such creative works. If the next Marvel feature is going to have CFX via AI there will be a backlash.
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We got a whole new, streamlined, shiny, super-efficient ERP system a couple of years ago, and the boss is currently interviewing for yet another new staff member to come and sit at a desk and try to perform a business task using it.
It's hilarious to watch.
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All this nonsense about prompts is just a transparent attempt to shift the blame for the poor output quality from the AI to the user.
That excuse isn't going to work forever.
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Who wrote the SQL, not the person with a CS degree, the boss will always delegate the task to someone, but you don't need to write a custom database engine for every data set either. Back in the 80s, you needed to be pretty savvy to build a "database", now anyone in the office can do it with Excel.
I can say you don't really need a degree in computing at all to be an SQL "engineer", data science or accounting is a much better avenue for those people.
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We have heard this one before. Used to be that robots were going to make you obsolete. Microprocessors before that. Jacquard looms even further back. Probably the first time they put a plough on an ox.
There's always some reason why joining a union will put you out of a job, and it's always just a scare story.
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when everybody loses their jobs to AI in a not-too-distant future?
If anything, it'll incentivize whoever wants to get rid of them to get rid of them faster. It's sad but true: unions only work when the unionized workers have something the employer needs that it can't get anywhere else. This will soon not be the case anymore here.
And replace them with what?
Better scripts, actual cinematography, model and set designers? People who can act? These are the jobs VFX artists replaced.
I watched Dr Strangelove again recently and it made me realise just how much of that film was clever cinematography, lighting, background music and scripts. It was dead obvious that most of the "flying" scenes were taken from a light aircraft and sped up a bit (just googled it, Polar footage from a B17), even for 1960's cinema but it didn't detract from
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AI is incapable of doing their job, or the VFX houses would already be using it to attempt to achieve the crippling workloads they regularly get given for a pittance
Suspicious outcome (Score:2)
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Could also mean that those doing the counting discarded votes that didn't match the desired outcome.
Could also mean that anyone likely to cast a dissenting vote was bullied into not voting or going along.
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This is the most likely, since unions are permitted to invite-only, non-anonymous voting and allows no oversight over the count.
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https://www.mwe.com/insights/n... [mwe.com]
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Now when an employer violates federal law, there are consequences. The fact that you're lying and trying to cover for law breakers and liars tells everyone you're ... well you meet e
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Feel free to disprove the above article with legal opinion instead of just blaming others.
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It's 50 people. Not sure why this is hard to believe.
Did they immediately go on strike (Score:2)
Joining SAG and WGA?
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Not VFX workers and not historic (Score:3)
These are on-set crews who should have been members under IATSE from the start. I'm not sure why they weren't, but maybe it's because Marvel labeled them "VFX". But in the end this will have zero effect on actual "computer jockey" VFX workers and I wish people would stop claiming it as a victory for us.