The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members of the production committee (often toy companies like Good Smile[0]) decided to deliberately take less money because they didn't want their control diluted. They're only able to do this because they can fleece animators into working longer for less money rather than having to get more capital in the project.
As for animators having to find new work... good? The current situation is one in which animators pursue their passions, and then have their passions completely take over their life and crush their soul. If they quit en masse, that would be backpressure against productions that want animators to fall on their swords, and production committees that want shit done cheaply.
[0] Who, incidentally, funded Hiroyuki Nishimura's[1] buyout of 4chan in exchange for all those J-List ads the site had.
[1] Former operator of 2channel who got pushed out in an incredibly sketchy way by his website host.
Isn’t this a paternalistic point of view? Why do you know better than the animators who are accepting these jobs? Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?
Unless you want to say that getting paid a minimum wage paternalistic?
I mean, in this scenario they wouldn't get a job, or it'd be an evergreen job that they shouldn't expect to get early in their careers. They wouldn't just laze around if they can't get paid as an animator (especially not in Japanese culture).
At best they'd try to be their own entrepreneur and make money that way, while gathering experience for these now-evergreen studios. At worst they give up or try another career. Paternalistic or not, almost every first world country has labor laws precisely so a job can't pay pennies to sustain its business. And governments do that because they don't want income hoarded by the managers and stifling the middle/low class economy.
Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.
Predictions of dire consequences rarely pan out. Fast food employees in Seattle are earning $15-20/+ per hour and prices did not double - in fact they're not significantly higher than in neighboring counties with lower wages. It turns out that labor costs are only a small fraction of overall costs.
They should learn to be hard workers, saving all the penies they can, never be sick, and some day if they don't die before it, living the dream of being their own boss.
Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
There are just plenty of loopholes and a lot of off the clock overtime that complicates things. Not just in anime but most of the Japanese workforce. That's a whole other topic to discuss, though.
>Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
A minimum wage doesn't guarantee "a particular wage". It only guarantees that if an exchange of money for labor occurs, that the price paid will meet the minimum. However, it doesn't guarantee that the transaction will occur, and if you're unemployed your "wage" is arguably $0.
If a job needs doing by a human at all, then that human does indeed deserve a reasonable baseline which allows them to exist and even do so with reasonable dignity.
As time goes on and jobs are done by machines, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a human, then the output and ownership of those machines simply should one way or another be distributed enough to have the same effect.
All they have to do to earn that is not be being a criminal right at that moment.
And this extends to people who can't do anything obviously productive too. Even a sick old grandma doing nothing but telling stories to kids for one hour a week is productive, and we have no excuse not to provide for even the ones who can't even do that.
Because even if "the Earth is a life boat", we don't exist in an environment of hardship with fixed and insufficient resources where there just isn't enough food and building material and energy to go around.
There simply is no excuse for the way we treat some people. They didn't do anything wrong enough to deserve it, and it is not forced by physical limits.
Talking about what value someone provides to earn their existence is just a way to rationalize taking advantage of others. None of this equates to "I will be forced to spend 20 years learning medicine to give my time away for free to bums!" But even if it did, why is that a bad thing exactly? Because it's what, like slavery? You mean, slavery is bad after all?
If it's 500 freelancers competing for the equivalent of 2 1-day jobs, the employer still has to pay something reasonable for a days work to 2 of them, and nothing to the rest. Or the granularity can be smaller like per hour, but the per hour rate is still some minimum that actually works.
It doesn't matter what the powerless individual worker is ostensibly "free" to do.
If you don’t like the amount being offered, then don’t accept it. This is not very complicated.
Animators are not powerless. It’s not like they are coal miners in a company town and this is the only job available for miles around. Nobody has to be an animator.
Honestly, if a friend came to you and said “my job sucks! They work us to the bone and pay us nothing!” Would you give them a speech about how their employer is evil and they are powerless or would you help them find another job?
It's particularly egregious in the US where healthcare is tied to employment, meaning that for many people a gap in unemployment would bankrupt them trying to pay for medication or care without insurance. The ACA was insufficient - policies through it are still incredibly expensive with high deductibles, and the lack of a public option for those ineligible for Medicare (or whose state governments declined medicare coverage for them) leaves them beholden to their employer.
I'm sure there are people who, at times, are in difficult situations. But those are usually not permanent. Are you telling me that someone gets one shitty job once and that is it? They permanently have that one job for the rest of their life? Empirically, that is not what happens. People do change jobs one way or another.
Yes, healthcare in the US could be better, but the article was about animators in Japan, so that is not really relevant. These aren't retail workers with no marketable skills or training. They're talented and well-trained to even be able to get the job in the first place. They just happen to want to work in one very over-saturated, highly competitive industry. Not just animation in general but specifically, anime. Anyone who could get a job there could probably get any graphic design or other job requiring art talent, they're just choosing not to because they want to do this one thing, and in the process driving down the price of labor.
It is detrimental to society to allow capital owners to pocket all the profits and drive the cost of labor down.
That can't happen by definition unless you get rid of inequality altogether, or engage in shenanigans like defining them as "contractors".
The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy! And whether you personally find a business model morally "valid" is not a good reason to make economic changes. People deserve a cost-benefit analysis before their livelihood is taken away. The economic consequences of increasing the minimum wage will be just the same as previous attempts. More automation, less customer service, more unemployment among low-skilled workers.
Where the line that separates goodwill custody of the commons like roads, public education, enforcing contracts and laws and "interference"?
Every time politicians decide to do good somewhere they do bad everywhere. It's not that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent (although many are) is just that free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.
I'm fascinated - does this hold under all conditions? Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
> It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit
Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states
Maybe not.
> Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
I don't think we should base our choice of economical system in the eventuality of an all-out war. Regardless of what I think in the event of an all-out war government will try to appropriate the resources it wants and gear the economy towards its needs because it can. A free market always efficiently allocate resources however I imagine the goals of the economical agents would be closer to preventing the destruction of wealth and human life than winning a war at all costs but this is context dependent.
Ukraine is an example where people from all over the world on their own volition contributed to the war effort in ways beyond what state violence could achieve. And Russia is the opposite example, top-down and dysfunctional.
> Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states.
People should have the freedom to use whatever they want as exchange medium. I don't know what is best but the current system with unsustainable growing debt do more harm than occasional adversarial nation-states could.
This is very much not true for worker salaries. For one thing, workers can not easily hop from area of expertise to area of expertise like capital can — and workers oftentimes lack the ability to take the high risk that might comes with quitting a job in search of another or attempting to switch career paths.
The natural state is for owners to drive down worker compensation until it's essentially slave labor. In a "competitive" world for owners, competing means driving down costs which means an across-the-board destruction of worker benefits.
We have some protections in this country (thank you, unions!) and full-stop rules against slavery that prevent us from actually seeing this, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen.
And trust me: People in financial power would absolutely grind workers down to a penny an hour and still claim it's "fair pay" if they could. They'd say "well, if it wasn't fair pay people wouldn't do it" while making sure the entirety of society was arranged to prevent people from leaving their jobs.
Uh, last I checked, capital is not capable of hopping from area of expertise to area of expertise. A GPU cannot decide to become a burger flipping robot (much to the dismay of some crypto investors).
A investor can quickly move capital from one industry to another, but the worker cannot.
That is one hell of a hand wave.
To say nothing of the lack of other regulations making it to where even with proper payment transparency one has no clue if an employer has a corporate culture that in many states would constitute an abusive pattern in a domestic partnership yet most of those same states have at best some limited carve-outs to do anything about it.
The entertainment industry in particular seems to be really good at exploiting folks, but in IT there is still a sort of elephant in the room; So many of us who read and post want to be the sorts of folks with vested-FAANG security cushions, however we know through self or colleagues plenty of cases where many shops will have a huge uphill battle to make a huge impacting change and the result is a nice review; in the extreme cases the reward/value is in multiple orders of magnitude.
And maybe that would be OK if it wasn't for the other pressures; which is probably something animators deal with too based on general tone and the times the industry tries to cleverly sneak jokes in about the situation.
>Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.
When possible. The issue is a lot of anime in Japan still relies in broadcast, so it's much harder to increase the cost of entry. Streaming is becoming more popular, but nowhere near as prevalent as the western streaming services.
And physical media... Well, feel free to look up your favorite anime's pricing in Japan. Not only the prices but the fact that they tend to bundle seasonal anime in batches of 2-3 episodes, not an entire seasonal box.
But the topic here is on Japan. They did increase their minimum wage last year, after the pandemic caused inflation in the Japanese economy for the first time in 30 years. Their economic situation is extremely different from the US which exploded (then receded, then kept rising) in those decades.
There are so many ways to define fair we could write essays on which method was most accurate and useful.
Free markets only exist in economics textbooks. Real markets unconstrained are always hopelessly broken. Bereft of rules most of the work would end up owned by a tiny number of companies who would agree what wages should be and agree not to hire each others workers. They would make access to all the most desirable work they control contingent on rules designed to strangle up and coming competitors in the cradle and gradually increase price to the absolute most the market would bear. Impoverishing the people who actually do the work would poison the pool of workers gradually destroying quality of content while companies increased prices to make up for lost profit and blamed piracy.
Capitalism is a toddler left on a rug with a cocked gun. The kid always finds the gun.
That is how (modern) society works already on a global scale. I am not saying it's good, but it's the way things are.
Every major commodity cobalt, shoes, cellphones etc has large scale automated production. What’s going on is essentially a parallel system where people making almost nothing can barely out complete automation. However, because both are occurring at the same time consumers wouldn’t notice a significant change if 100% of that production was automated.
Granted without infrastructure and a skilled workforce you can’t instantly swap to automation, but that’s a different question.
the automate-able industries have done it, leaving behind the ones that aren't as automatable. This is why there's still many developing countries that export cheap labour. You can think of those as the "underpaid" class.
Not necessarily bad, since i believe they are not being forced under lock and chain in slavery. They are merely economically incentivized.
That’s not to say nobody is making subsistence wages making shoes, just that there’s robots making shoes in another factory. It may not be 1:1 in every niche as a train isn’t a drop in replacement for a long haul trucker, but they are still in competition.
Similarly, maybe we should have fewer musicians and less music, but at least we have an absence of the slave economy you mention. Maybe the medical profession is doing something right by limiting the flow of the pipeline.
Income: $100,000/month
Expenses: $50,000/month
Payroll:
Cashier: $290/month
Cashier: $290/month
Cashier: $290/month
Janitor: $290/month
Security: $290/month
Manager: $1,000/month
Owner: $45,000/month
I understand the point you're trying to make, but you'd be better off using real numbers to do it. I've never come across a business owner taking 45% of total income. Competition ensures those kinds of profit levels generally don't exist.