A Blog to Discuss the formation of a VFX Digital Artists Guild
Archive for the ‘Labor’ Category.
Developing story. Looking for confirmation and details on this.
We recently heard that MBO, a predatory Employer of Record, is pulling out of payroll administration for FX and Animation related business. I’ll post more as I confirm the story and find out more information.
Other EOR stories on FXDAG include:
Fired from MBO – A True Story with a Happy Ending
Artists fights back against MBO and Yurkor Employers of Record
There’s some really good information available on-line regarding salaries in the VFX and Animation industries if you know where to look. Artists often suffer from vast information asymmetry when entering negotiations. Your manager knows exactly how much artists at your facility make but chances are you have no idea. Your manager probably has a discretionary budget for raises and salaries for the year and quite possibly makes a bonus based on the amount of this budget remaining at the end of the year so they have a personal interest in keeping wages and raises as low as possible. The best way to level the playing field and eliminate the information asymmetry is to talk openly with your co-workers about their salaries. People are often reluctant to do this, so perhaps an anonymous poll at your workplace would feel more appropriate. In addition, there are several on-line resources for wage information.
There’s a wealth of wage information on-line if you know where to look. Hopefully the information below will help you in your next negotiation.
VFX Soldier’s Wage Information Spreadsheet
VFX Soldier has a good article about wages and salaries in the VFX and animation industries.
By law, wage information for non-U.S. citizens working under H1-B visas must be publicly disclosed. The data is usually a couple of years behind but still relevant. The most recent searchable data on-line is from 2008 but the 2009 data may be downloaded. The Animation Guild posts their annual wage surveys. Web sites such as vfxConnection post the results of their independent wage polls. Executive compensation is a matter of public record for public companies or companies filing for IPO.
Search the on-line H1-B database at the FLC Data Center
The Animation Guild (TAG) 2010 wage survey
The web site VFXwages is devoted to tracking wages in the VFX industry
Regarding executives, if the company is public or has tried to go public, the salaries of the company officers must be published by the SEC and can be found in the SEC EDGAR database.
The following table presents certain summary information for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2007 concerning compensation earned for services rendered in all capacities to us and our subsidiaries by the Named Executive Officers during such period.
Summary Compensation Table for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2007
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| Name and Principal Position | Year | Salary ($) (1) |
Bonus ($) (2) |
Stock Awards ($) |
Option Awards ($) (3) |
All Other Compensation ($) |
Total ($) |
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| Mark Miller (4) President and Chief Executive Officer |
2007 | $ | 548,097 | $ | 51,600 | — | $ | 149,553 | — | $ | 749,250 | |||||||||||||||||
| Cliff Plumer Chief Technology Officer |
2007 | 524,336 | 51,600 | — | 149,553 | — | 725,489 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Ed Ulbrich Executive Vice President |
2007 | 447,116 | 150,000 | — | 49,698 | — | 646,814 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Yvette Macaluso (5) Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer |
2007 | 261,231 | 100,000 | — | 86,284 | — | 447,515 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Joseph Gabriel Vice President, Business Affairs and General Counsel |
2007 | 282,693 | — | — | 33,753 | — | 316,446 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Carl Stork (6) Vice Chairman and Former Chief Executive Officer |
2007 | 300,000 | — | — | — | — | 300,000 | |||||||||||||||||||||
VFX Soldier posted a very informative analysis of union benefits and how organizing might actually be a more economical model for providing benefits to their employees.
Read more here: http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/could-unionization-save-vfx-facilities/
Here’s an excerpt:
So how much would organization actually cost? Well according to sources in the IATSE, the national labor organization that The Animation Guild is a part of, a guild employer would have to pay the following for each worker:
- about $4 per hour worked plus about a 6% contribution into the IAP (Individual Account Plan).
I estimate the IAP contribution to be about $6000 a year. If you want to see how that number is calculated go here but lets make an assumption and calculate the amount based on an artist’s salary.
- Assume an artist works 40 hours per week for a total of 2080 hours a year.
- Assume that artist makes $48 an hour for a nice even salary total of about $100,000 per year.
The total amount an employer would probably have to pay to the guild would calculate to be about $14,500 per year. (*Correction – this amount isn’t paid to the guild, it is paid into the health and pension benefits. The only money paid to the guild are the dues paid by workers.) That’s far less than the national average of 30% employers pay to administer benefits.
In a recent e-mail to it’s members, The Animation Guild announces it will get proactive in organizing non-union animation shops. This still requires work on the part of employees but it’s good to see that TAG is stepping up to help.
Here’s that mail from Steve Hulett, with contact e-mails at the bottom:
The Animation Guild is getting more proactive working with non-signator animation studios in Southern California. To that end, we’ve recently hired Steve Kaplan, a veteran visual effects artist, as our new Organizer.
There are a number of medium-sized shops doing work for the entertainment conglomerates, and it is our plan and goal to bring as many as possible into the Guild’s family of studios.
We encourage our members to take whatever work they can to stay employed and in the industry, and we fully understand that many of us work at non-signator studios from time to time. Unfortunately, not all studios are aware of the benefits to them of becoming part of our family.
So, we’d like your assistance. If you are currently working non-union, contact Steve Kaplan or Steve Hulett and let us know where you are working and what project you are working on.
The Guild has never nor will ever have a problem with its members remaining employed. Our aim is to provide a seamless cloak of portable health and pension benefits for everyone in animation.
Respond to these e-mail addresses and help us help you to get the contractual benefits you deserve.
info@animationguild.org
shulett@animationguild.org
skaplan@animationguild.org
Have you seen the Open Letter to James Cameron? Did you listen to the VFX Town Hall? Are you just concerned about the state of the industry and wondering what can be done? Want a union? Hate the idea? Make yourself heard!
While it’s great that the conversation has started, it’s up to the artists to continue it and give the issue a face, and the solution its momentum. There’s a talk and live chat about it on Talkshoe. There’s a free live chatroom, your words will be seen and heard. Let’s start figuring this out.
For a two-year-old discussion along these lines with Ryan and Teague on the subject of getting into the industry, general questions answered and do’s-and-don’ts discussed, enjoy this.
Michael “Dorkman” Scott (@DorkmanScott) is a filmmaker and freelance visual effects artist in Los Angeles.
Ryan Wieber (@RyanWieber) is a senior VFX compositor in his sixth year at Stargate Studios, where he has worked on hundreds of shots spanning dozens of episodic television shows… including, perhaps most notably, as a lead artist on NBC’s “Heroes”. He is a two-time Emmy winner for Visual Effects, with a third nomination.
Teague Chrystie (@TeagueChrystie)is a visual effects generalist and career freelancer, who’s compositing, motion graphics and 3D work has appeared in dozens of television shows, music videos, commercials and feature films. Acting as moderator on the panel, he’ll conduct the conversation in the room and relay questions from the chat room to the panel.
A shared public Google document to help the visual effect community hash out their ideas about what a visual effects guild would do and how it would work. There’s a permanent link to an embedded reference of this Google document on the top menu of the fxdag.org web page. You can also get to it here:
A disturbing trend in the world of the freelance visual effects artist is the recent requirement from various production companies that short term employees sign up with “Employers of Record” services in order to skirt the rules regarding the classification of employees Vs. freelancers.
There have been several recent articles written about this Freelancers Dilemma and you can read them at The Animatinon World Network and Motiongrapher web sites.
This practice seems to have started on the East coast but is spreading West to the dread of California based freelance visual effects artists. These “Employers of Record” companies charge the freelancer a percentage of their paycheck in order to deal with the paperwork, effectively offloading the typical payroll and accounting costs that a production company would absorb onto the backs of the freelancer without offering any of the benefits such as sick days, vacation, health insurance, retirement plans or legal counsel. Some production companies will not hire an artist unless they agree to sign up and pay specific “Employer of Record” services. At the end of the day, the freelancer is classified as an employee of the EOR service company.
This unfortunate situation resulted from a recent crack down on the convenient but illegal practice of classifying employees as freelancers. There’s a good article on that posted in the New York Times, linked here, about this practice in general use. The extensive fines for studios engaged in the practice of misclassifying workers created a perfect storm for companies like MBO and Yurcor to step in and make a buck while sheltering the studios from scrutiny, oversight and the responsibility of providing usual and customary services, such as payroll and benefits, to their freelancers, er, employees.
Under normal circumstances, freelance workers and independent consultants would be prohibited from forming a labor union since a union functions to collectively bargain for a group of employees and and an independent contractor by definition is neither a group nor an employee however once a freelancer signs on with an “Employer of Record” they are, in fact, employees… not of the production company but of the Employer of Record. This puts the EOR in the position of being the employer of a large number of visual effects artists who may now be eligible to form or join an organized labor union.
One New York-based VFX worker and former union member has suggested that perhaps The Animation Guild or The Editors Guild could look into this practice and at least think about the possibility of promoting the idea of organizing the labor of this marginalized group of visual effects workers who now may be eligible to organize. What are the Employers of Record at this point if not very large shops?
Could the thousands of visual effects artists who are forced to sign up with EOR’s print out and pass around Union Authorization Cards? Would this perhaps force the EOR’s to sign union contracts at which point the studios that hire workers through the EOR’s will be required to pay fair rates and not abuse their formerly freelance workers through unreasonable hours or conditions?
Would it be possible to organize the EOR companies like MBO and Yurkor so that workers bouncing from company to company would have the portable benefits a labor union could provide?
I don’t profess to know the full scale of the issue or the legal realities of the situation so I invite the readers of this blog to hash this idea out in the comments section. I look forward to hearing from you.
Over a vfxoverflow.com Juliann Mann posed the question about whether or not VFX artists need a union. There are some interesting links in the main article and some thoughts about worldwide labor organization in the comments.
This is an e-mail response I added to a thread on a discussion group. I thought I’d cross post it here since it has some important information.
On 2/27/2010 , SOMEONE wrote:
As a VFX artist and supervisor, with my significant other being a <REDACTED> artist, supporting <REDACTED> dependents in <REDACTED>, I would love to know some answers. No one has actually told us how to start a Union, who would pay for it, or even the likelihood of it succeeding.
While nobody knows the likelihood of something like this succeeding, there’s a well established path towards organizing labor. It’s heavily legislated and there are very clear guidelines. Existing organizations such as IATSE, TEG and TAG can help you get the ball rolling at your place of work but it takes a certain amount of cajones to stand up and call for union representation.
As for as who pays for it, it’s a combination of members who pay initiation fees and dues as well as contributions from each employer running a union shop. As an example, The Animation Guild initiation fee is based on two weeks the minimum scale wage (hopefully less than your actual rate of pay) for your position plus $101 per quarter dues. The initiation fee currently ranges from around $1,500 to around $2,500.
I am not sure at this time how the employer contributions are calculated.
On 2/27/2010, SOMEONE continued:
By the way… we really need a Union, not a Guild. There are too many of us for a Guild. On a movie there is one director, he has a guild, a few editors, a few writers… all in guilds. The grips, the truck drivers, all in Unions. We outnumber all those guys… we need a Union. A guild would only serve the sups.
Guild is just a nicer way to say Union. They are synonymous. Both The Animation Guild and The Editors Guild are unions under IATSE. IATSE is the same union that oversees locals that rep the grips and truck drivers. I have collected several links, including instructions on how to organize, at the www.fxdag.org web site for future reference however I will also publish the links here for immediate gratification. I am happy to let the fxdag.org web site serve as a clearing house for information and ideas in conjunction e-mail on this list. Let me know if there’s something you want to see on there.
Between The Editors Guild and The Animation Guild, both of which are IATSE Unions, there’s a huge knowledge base regarding how to organize labor. They have professional organizers willing to help but it takes boots on the ground at each facility to get it done. Employees at each facility need to do this from the inside. An outside agency cannot and will not swoop in to organize your work place for you. Employees need to step up and lead the organization process. If you want to organize your work place, do some research. Read up on it and contact the folks at TAG and TEG. While they may encourage you to join their respective guilds, they’ll also help if you want to form your own local under IATSE.
You’ll need to form an organizing committee, pass out authorization cards at your work, get signatures and call for a vote. You can read more details in the supplied links here.
How To Unionize Your Production Work Place
I Want to Start a Union Where I Work
How do I get my Employer to Sign with The Animation Guild
Animation Guild Representation Card
IATSE – How to Organize in the US
IATSE – What is a Union Organizing Campaign?
National Labor Relations Board
Animation Guild contact information:
Phone Number: (818) 845‑7500
info@animationguild.org
Editors Guild Contact Information:
Contacts: Tris Carpenter National Organizer
323.876.4770, Ext 244
tcarpenter@editorsguild.com
Rob Callahan Organizer – Los Angeles 323.876.4770, Ext. 245
rcallahan@editorsguild.com
Toll Free Los Angeles 800.705.8700
IATSE Contact Info:
IATSE General Office
1430 Broadway 20th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Telephone: 212-730-1770
Office of the International President Fax: 212-730-7809
Office of the General Secretary-Treasurer Fax: 212-921-7699
ITASE Organzing Department e-mail: organizing@iatse-intl.org
Over at VFXtalk.com there’s a big discussion going on about the “Open letter to James Cameron” that readers of this blog might be interested in.