I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved in collusion.)
Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real difference, significantly smaller than the film bonus plans, and on top of that, I never felt like I'd been underpaid or cheated even after this all went public.
Even as an employee, I don't think I ever knew the full story, but the Cartoon Brew articles always struck me as going out of their way to stoke anger and frame things in the most negative possible light, not particularly fair or unbiased.
While I do not in any way intend to defend what Catmull or others did, the fact that not just one but two studios I worked for did close, I've always felt like it is plausible that Catmull truly believed he was doing a good thing for employees in the long term by trying to keep the doors open, and that the threat that they might close was real, that his refusal to apologize was out of genuine belief that he wasn't being selfish. I'm sure it'd be hard to fully buy that if you saw his tax return, but nonetheless is how I still feel when I read these articles again.
Of course, another way to read this is that these studios weren't viable if they had to play by the rules. So they broke the rules and violated the rights of their staff.
Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed.
The film industry didn't die that day - just some bad studios.
> Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed.
I happen to know for a fact that’s not true in either case of the two studios I worked for.
I also don’t particularly appreciate your presumptuous and uninformed conclusion about them being bad studios. Both I worked for were quite good studios, one of them being PDI which made the Shrek & Madagascar movies. No idea to what degree the studios were involved at all, only the parent companies were named. (Edit: actually I’m certain the other studio was not participating in any way, but was still part of the class, being Disney owned. I’ve edited my upper comment to clarify.)
The truth of the CG & VFX industry is that it was always bad margins in the US. Pretty much the whole industry imploded in the US some time after this lawsuit. Not in response to the lawsuit, just because the business is hard to sustain, and subsidies in Canada, Europe, India, and China, has made outsourcing a much bigger part of the picture. The CG film industry hasn’t died exactly, but in the US it’s definitely still on life support.
And I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries either. It was then and is now still true that working in digital entertainment doesn’t pay on average and for entry level employees as well as working in other areas of tech.
I don’t feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries either
A couple years ago I talked to a few of my friends in the 2d animation industry and they were like "all the studios are constantly trying to stretch the job descriptions to get more work out of what's already a punishing workload". It's a brutal business all around, even in their side of things where they actually have a union. There's a lot of people willing to work for peanuts because they get to be part of the magic, including me twenty years ago.
I look from outside and I really dunno if I feel like the broad cg/vfx/animation industry's sustainable. Everything costs so damn much and the field's increasingly crowded, despite it all slowly turning into divisions of Disney competing with itself.
No they weren’t. The C-level staff of the parent companies named as defendants in the lawsuit were, and the parent companies are all still in business. The studios that closed were pawns, just like the employees.
The bad studios comment wasn't meant to be a judgement of the product or your work. I had meant bad businesses (costs exceed revenues). Take even that with a grain of salt - I was taking all my facts from the comment I responded to and the link. I'm not familiar with this particular saga.
I realize the way I wrote my first comment led you to believe the studios were knowingly involved in the collusion, but that’s not what I intended to say, which is why I clarified. It’s just best not to make assumptions or try to make strong statements about something you’re not familiar with. The narrative summary you left is entirely backwards, because good studios closed while the suits’ defendants are still here and still operating. The studios I was in weren’t bad business either. Revenues exceeded costs. These closures happened for other reasons, despite the fact that CG as a whole isn’t very profitable for most players.
Ultimately, this is why we have regulation: because if behavior is allowed that lowers the cost to do business, businesses in a highly competitive space will eventually do it.
It's important to hold regulators responsible for policing these companies, because otherwise market forces will tend to drag quality-of-life down for employees.
(Whether no-poaching agreements should be considered price-fixing is a separate question, but assuming they are, they must be enforced or the end result is employee harm across the industry, because prices are a function of what the competitor will pay too).
I fully agree about the need for regulation, especially because it matters more in other commodity industries (farming, food, construction, etc.) much more than it does in computer graphics.
There wasn’t a noticeable reduction in my own quality of life, but that’s not to say others didn’t feel it, nor that it wouldn’t have happened left unchecked, I don’t know.
Once after a movie’s crunch time, I wanted to trade my accumulated overtime bonus for comp time (time off) instead. The studio refused, and I was initially upset but then discovered that in California it was illegal for them to agree to it. The reason is that labor jobs in the past had abused comp time by rewarding employees who were working too much with forced time off in which they weren’t getting paid. This would be awful for farm workers or any labor job, really, and more damaging the lower the pay. I’m happy this law is protecting them even when I didn’t want it applied to me.
Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real difference, significantly smaller than the film bonus plans, and on top of that, I never felt like I'd been underpaid or cheated even after this all went public.
Even as an employee, I don't think I ever knew the full story, but the Cartoon Brew articles always struck me as going out of their way to stoke anger and frame things in the most negative possible light, not particularly fair or unbiased.
While I do not in any way intend to defend what Catmull or others did, the fact that not just one but two studios I worked for did close, I've always felt like it is plausible that Catmull truly believed he was doing a good thing for employees in the long term by trying to keep the doors open, and that the threat that they might close was real, that his refusal to apologize was out of genuine belief that he wasn't being selfish. I'm sure it'd be hard to fully buy that if you saw his tax return, but nonetheless is how I still feel when I read these articles again.