I think that movies and videogames industry need to get the hell out of America. Wages are too high. Making a triple A game takes a staff of 500 these days.
This is something they do, Marvel rely on outsourcing and using ununionised labour [1], and it shows in the recent films and TV shows they've made. There's a drop in the quality of the VFX. Wages for VFX artists aren't too high, as I've said, they are some of the most underpaid workers in the industry, and their protest against this is always stomped out. For a VFX worker it must be highly frustrating working in an industry where other workers are unionised, but they aren't.
Can you point me to a clip on YouTube that you would consider to be good Bollywood VFX? I've mostly been exposed to the most comically bad Bollywood VFX.
VFX artists can definitely make a good living. Their salaries are comparable to tech if you remove the stock portion. They also work crazy OT and are paid hourly which means big money. That's true if you're more senior of course.
Read the credits at the end of any CGI heavy movie from Disney, or AAA game like GoW and notice how many Indian names show up. It is a highly outsourced biz model, and most of the grunt work is humans doing repetitive tasks over and over for $1 to return $1.01
I cannot speak for videogames, but I have a family member who was in the movie industry doing CG stuff, and it is already heavily outsourced to other countries than the U.S., particularly Canada, India, and Australia. I’ve been told that the movie industry is essentially dead in the U.S., besides having rights holders/production managers/etc.
Actually, the peeve is that capital (and profit) is now permitted to be mobile, while labor is generally not. The EU trade zone is the one, shining notable exception.
That is: we move our money into whatever markets we want, we withdraw our profits as we choose, but heaven forbid that labor should be allowed to move as it pleases.
> Pitting one workforce against another is an old trick used to control them all.
It's not a trick, it's the same as you choosing the cheapest product on a shelf between two competing brands. It's the foundation of a competitive market that puts high incentives to produce products the most efficiently and most cost effectively. Which is a huge boon to consumers and has lead to us all having a better standard of living than anyone else in history.
Being in country A and able to choose products made in country B is the result of specific political and legal choices made by the power structures of both countries.
Historically, there was nothing inevitable about the free movement of capital, goods and profit, but over the last half century or more, this has come to be seen as "normal".
Your argument is the classic one in favor of removing restrictions on the movement of capital, goods and profit (not labor!), and has been the justification for almost every free trade agreement over the last 75 years.
The evidence of it being a net benefit to everyone is now starting to skew against that claim. The distribution of negative environmental externalities to poor countries in particular argues against it (i.e. country X can make your widgets cheaper because they have less regulation about waste and pollution).
We're all consumers, it is true. But we're all citizens and employees too, and we spend more of our lives in those roles. Global free trade may be a boon to our lives as consumers, but it's been fucking over our lives as citizens and employees for too long alread.
[1] - https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...