The Organizing

Last week, TAG and the IA held another meet in Culver City with visual effects artists. I didn't attend but I'm informed it went well ...


But I had occasion to talk to a visual effects staffer who told me:

Sony's working to move more animators and lighters to Vancouver. They've been offering cg techs and artists the same wages on a fifty-hour week in Canada. This was all going on before the IA's organizing drive.

Vancouver's a pricey city and people who're going up there are being asked to take a pay cut. Which, I'm sorry, is what the fifty-hour week at the same L.A. weekly rate is. There's talk between artists about going union. Unionization isn't viewed by most as a bad thing, like it was before the union election years ago. Now people are looking at it, fewer employees are dismissing it, like before. Some supervisors are against, but the overall atmosphere is different this time.

Salaries are going up in China and India, especially for people who know what they're doing. Here, wages have been flat or declining. So the gap is narrowing between artists in foreign studios who are good at what they do and artists here in California. ...

As we've noted before: It's not enough to be a lower cost foreign animation studio. You also need to be a low cost facility with a crew that knows what it's doing. This is often harder to do than many execs imagine.