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Comment by ClemFandango | Hacker News Reader

Is nobody going to address the series of elephants in the room here? Even the embedded video in the article didn't say anything about it, and the author's proposed and current solution is more or less a social band-aid. These animators need to unionise, or demand full-time/part-time employment conditions that are outside of their current contractual arrangement if they want to see any progress. At least then they should come under some kind of minimum wage law. Lamenting the issues of the industry as if they are some kind of force of nature that is part-and-parcel with the nature of the work seems intentionally ignorant to me. They only have to suffer these conditions because of the companies they are working for.

It's all well and good for the commenters here to say that dream jobs will often have hard conditions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be so if we have government or union enforced labour conditions that aren't predatory.

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It's nice to see comments that actually talk about unionizing.

> It's all well and good for the commenters here to say that dream jobs will often have hard conditions, but that doesn't necessarily have to be so if we have government or union enforced labour conditions that aren't predatory.

Well said!

It could be that the supply for animators far exceeds the demand. No amount of bandaid is going to fix that.

Understandable, but it's beside the point. The point is that legally mandated (and enforced!) employment agreements should exist regardless of the amount of people vying for jobs.

I mean in cases like that, unions often just constrain supply artificially. But that just creates a new problem, in that people who want to fill a role and are capable of filling a role can't necessarily fill a role that the company would be happy to give them if not for the union saying that this individual is locked out from filling the role.

The animation and VFX artists in California are unionized. For example, here's the Animation Guild [1] and the list of studios covered [2]. It's basically all the big names plus many of the small ones.

What the union couldn't do is prevent jobs from offshoring: the jobs moved to Vancouver, Montreal, and wherever else the tax credits were. I think it's still the case that the studios are getting like a 50% tax rebate on Canadians working in film in Vancouver. When your staff are "half price", that's hard to compete with.

tl;dr: it's not a lack of unions.

[1] https://animationguild.org/

[2] https://animationguild.org/about-the-guild/studio-list/

I'll be honest in saying that I didn't consider the American experience. The article and video in question was about the Japanese Anime industry, which as far as I could see, works by contract direct to animation studios, without union representation.

I think you're conflating animation and VFX. They both have different stories than the Japanese anime industry this article is about. These [1] are the kinds of studios I think of for VFX and none of them are in the Animation Guild.

The Animation Guild has been around since the 50s. There were fights in the 70s and 80s over offshoring. In my experience, in the past few decades the Animation Guild has great training programs, medical and retirement, but doesn't really swing its weight around over employment.

VFX was completely separate and has never been unionized. There were efforts in the 90s that turned into the Visual Effects Society, which is more about promoting VFX and recognizing achievements. There were efforts again when Rhythm and Hues closed the same year it won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects that also didn't go anywhere.

[1] https://studiohog.com/vfx-studios/United-States/California/L...

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