Animation writers make a minimum of $2,064 per week, while WGA weekly minimums range from $4,063 to $5,185 - that comes out to TAG writers making 41 to 52 cents on the dollar per week compared to live-action writers. In the negotiations, TAG writers are pushing for pay parity with WGA members. While these talks have received less attention than the IATSE contracts that were just ( barely) ratified by 60,000 members of the film and television industry, they concern a workforce that is relegated to far worse standards than its live-action counterparts. (WGA does represent Fox’s prime-time animation writers, including those on The Simpsons and Family Guy, an arrangement that followed from those writers - whose prime-time, live-action experience increased their leverage - having organized what were previously nonunion shows into a union shop in the late 1990s.) These animation writers, who constitute around 10 percent of TAG’s roughly 3,000 members, are currently in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over a new three-year contract. Indeed, workers say that one animation studio still has a physical black book with the names and photos of blacklisted writers.Īnimation writers’ roots in storyboard artistry walled them off from live-action writers, who are represented by the WGA, and the result is a staggering disparity in pay and benefits. In 1952, writers at Disney and Warner Brothers formed TAG, but the union busting never went away. That was in 1941 in 1947, Disney told Congress that the SCG was “taking orders from Moscow.” (As a New York Daily News headline read at the time, “Communists Tried to Capture Mickey Mouse, says Disney.”) When Art Babbitt, one of Disney’s star cartoonists - he was responsible for Goofy, the evil stepmother in Snow White, and Geppetto in Pinocchio - helped lead the union drive, Disney fired him and twenty-three other workers, provoking a strike.
Walt Disney viciously fought the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG), Local 839’s predecessor, when his own cartoonists began organizing. Such vehement anti-unionism has a long history in animation studios. More than a decade after the dispute, when one writer tried to hire one of the participants in the failed union drive for a show, he was told “that person won’t be working here.” “Nickelodeon blacklisted every one of them,” says one animation writer with decades of experience in the industry who requested anonymity. As for the writers involved in the turn-of-the-century union drive at Nickelodeon, they were punished. Eventually, the writers of Nickelodeon shows joined the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 839, The Animation Guild (TAG), which represents the majority of animation writers. In response, the writers picketed the studio’s Burbank, California, headquarters. An unfair labor practice (ULP) filing with the National Labor Relations Board alleged that the studio then illegally reduced the compensation of pro-union writers on The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. The studio’s biggest hit programs were nonunion, so these writers signed union authorization cards.
When the writers of children’s cartoons like SpongeBob SquarePants and Hey Arnold! tried to unionize with the Writers Guild of America (WGA) twenty years ago, Nickelodeon was quick to retaliate.