It's also an interesting development given that they only recently started promoting a cloud-based service for integrating their technology with Maya & Houdini.
For US HNers - it's different than in the US where health insurance is tied to employment. I typically have the exact same health coverage whether I'm employed, self-employed, or un-employed.
That’s a very different experience to the rite of passage a lot of devs (myself included) have taken because there’s high constant demand and high day rates.
Thus, they're not "contract employees" but "independent contractors"--which, without the law change, wouldn't have been legal in the same way "gig workers" failed to meet the criteria of "independent" in many places/cases (e.g. working for more than one client at a time, having control over work location etc).
(There was some recent coverage of this history in this article (although it appears the relevant full text is not available online): https://web.archive.org/web/20210921132447/https://northands...)
Have no insider scoop on Weta in particular, but just hitting back that having contractors instead of employees is somehow unethical.
It's unethical when the people concerned aren't independent contractors but are treated as such because it's cheaper for the company (e.g. in regard to sick pay, holiday pay etc) than treating them as employees.
If you like a 6 month engagement length, that's cool, there's nothing stopping you from agreeing to a 6 month employment contract.
Although even that is unethical on a company's part if they're taking advantage of power imbalances in the employment market to transfer risk/cost onto employees only "agreeing" to short term contracts under duress.
I mean how far do we take this - you've got 3 months worth of building to be done at your house, so you have to form an LLC and employ carpenters directly?
Cool, and one of those responsibilities is ensuring that the contract arrangement is that of independent contractor and not employee.
(Well, actually, it's more that your right as an employee is that your employer has the responsibility to ensure the arrangement isn't being misrepresented. So, really, you're free to make whatever arrangement you like but if your "client" is actually your employer they open themselves up to legal risk.)
And, if your arrangement meets the legal criteria, then great, you can be a contractor.
And, if it doesn't, then you can "lobby" the government to change the law so that you get what you want and other people get to be more easily exploited by their employers.
Or, you know, you can ensure that you have multiple clients, work at times & locations & on equipment controlled by you, on specific pre-agreed tasks and/or whatever other legal requirements need to be met to be considered a contractor.
With regard to the carpenters, company structure is unrelated to whether or not you're considered an employer by law. If the arrangement you have with the carpenters meets the criteria of being an employer/employee relationship, then, that's what it is.
But most likely they're independent contractors free to accept & refuse work as they wish, have & use their own tools etc etc or they're employees of a building firm you've actually contracted with.
I've worked with some of weta's toolset on the avatar sequels and I've also worked with unreal on various projects... it's interesting hearing this and I wonder if that's part of the toolset that will be released
Film projects have weird schedules. You simply couldn't run a business if you had to have a consistent set of people over time.
In that case, maybe the senior management should stop referring to the other people as "employees" then.
And, if being an employee is such a bad deal, why would senior management choose to be employees rather than "independent contractors".
> But there are lots of long-serving staff who are basically employees.
There's no such thing as "basically employees" (or indeed "staff" who aren't employees) they're either "actually independent contractors" or "employees intentionally & exploitatively miscategorized as independent contractors").
> You earn more as a contractor.
That's certainly what the management want people to think, for sure. But if being an employee isn't even a possibility it's conveniently pretty hard to know if that's actually the case.
> You simply couldn't run a business if you had to have a consistent set of people over time.
Perhaps that means it's actually a "hobby" or a "charity" rather than a business then?
And, regardless, that just means you hire people as employees on fixed term contracts, not that you get to miscategorize them & get the law changed to make it "legal".
None of this is about a better deal for the people doing the work--it's entirely possible for a fully loaded employee cost to be 2x salary so if the company can get the workers to accept 1.5x salary & shift risk to them, well, that's just a great deal for the company, isn't it.
Especially in an industry with an unending supply of creative people willing to be ground up in the process of doing what they love.
Perhaps we should take a lesson from what happened to the dinosaurs that worked as "independent contractors" for oil industry...