In 2018, the Animation Guild’s then-business representative and president celebrated the ratification of a new master agreement with an announcement that also served as a call to action. Asserting that member involvement had increased that year, the IATSE Local 839 leaders still noted that “there is much more work to do” in future contract discussions and asked members to participate more in coming years “so together we may strive for even greater gains in the future.”
Three years later, as negotiations have begun on the successor to that 2018 contract, a social media campaign from members aimed at improving pay for animation writers appears to be fulfilling that wish. Following the ratification of a controversial IATSE Basic Agreement (which had to be in place before TAG began its negotiations), in November TAG members launched the #PayAnimationWriters hashtag advocating to close the pay gap between animation and live-action writers.
Related Stories
Taking a leaf out of the book of other IATSE social media campaigns like #IASolidarity and #IALivingWage, animation writers have explained the longtime pay differential between animation writers covered by TAG and live-action writers covered by the Writers Guild of America in posts including the hashtag. That strategy has once again garnered attention: The campaign has since its inception trended at least twice in California on Twitter, and the IA Stories Instagram page — born out of the union’s Basic Agreement negotiations, with around 167,000 followers — has shared content supporting the hashtag as well.
Now, as negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) are set to continue through Dec. 2, TAG is resurfacing the issue of livable wages in Hollywood even as it fights on multiple fronts for new gains in its latest master agreement. While this round TAG members have primarily discussed pay parity for animation writers, as is typical for entertainment unions leading up to and amid negotiations, most items on the agenda are not being revealed. (TAG sources spoke to The Hollywood Reporter before a media blackout began with the start of negotiations on Nov. 29. The AMPTP declined comment on this story.)
“We have more engagement, we have more support than ever, so it feels like a very good time,” says co-chair of TAG’s Writers Craft Committee and member of its negotiation committee Madison Bateman (DuckTales). “I think as much as we’ve been pushing #PayAnimationWriters, there is craft solidarity: We all want higher wages for all animation workers.”
Forming a campaign around writers permits TAG to point to some clear pay differences between comparable jobs, however. Though TAG members — some of whom are also members of the WGA, which covers some animation writers and offers them the same minimums as live-action writers — say WGA writers working in live-action and animation do the same job, the difference in pay is stark. As of May 1, 2021, a journey-person “animation story person” or “animation writer” covered by TAG made a weekly minimum of $2,064 while working on a half-hour scripted series, while television writers associated with the WGA made between $3,964 and $5,059 a week. When it comes to freelance scripts for half-hour scripted series, TAG says that its writer minimum as of May 1, 2021, was $9,099, while WGA minimums ranged between $12,290 and $27,100 in that same period. TAG writers also do not receive primary residuals like some so-called above-the-line unions (like SAG-AFTRA), members say.
Adds dual TAG and WGA member Len Uhley, a writer who primarily works in animation, “We use the same software, we fight the same problems of storytelling, structure, plot and character. It’s all the same.”
While the pay differential with live-action writers has long been a point of frustration for TAG’s writer contingent, the issue came to a head over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The fact that entertainment mostly ground to a halt over the pandemic with the exception of animation [and] animation writers rooms largely stayed working and got a lot of these companies through the pandemic really shed an even brighter light on the contributions that animation writers [make],” says Bill Wolkoff, a dual member of TAG and WGA who has worked on both live-action and animation projects. TAG’s Writers Craft Committee, which formed in the wake of the union’s 2018 negotiations, also played a key role in foregrounding the issue within the organization prior to this round of employer talks.
TAG members further say that industry trends like smaller episode orders, which have pushed animation writers rooms to increasingly hire more freelance workers, are making their members’ relatively low minimums an ever-more pressing issue. Animation workers who have become perma-freelancers, moving from job to job, don’t enjoy much leverage to negotiate beyond their minimums, Guild members say. Writers tweeting with the #PayAnimationWriters hashtag have mentioned struggling to pay rent or to afford monthly expenses without dipping into savings; one self-identified spouse of an animation writer discussed delaying vacations and having a second child “to maintain the grind.” One animation writer tells THR they feel they’re lucky to be married to someone with consistent health insurance because “our health coverage is available, and then it’s not.”
The increasing prevalence of perma-freelancers has also bolstered the barrier to entry for up-and-coming writers, said co-chair of TAG’s Writers Craft Committee Mairghread Scott. A writers room composed of staffers can help train a less experienced writer who brings a unique point of view, she says. Without a room of staffers, “it puts a lot of pressure on head writers to just hire people they know who can do the job reliably and quickly, and it squashes new voices and the very kind of people that the studios keep saying they want to hire.”
Even as TAG has been tight-lipped about other key priorities this round of negotiations, the union has suggested it will be fighting for better compensation from streaming projects, just as other IATSE Locals did this past summer. “Small screens no longer mean small budgets. #Streaming is thriving, and #animation is a big part of it. We deserve a better contract to reflect this growth!” states one sample social media post provided to members in TAG’s press kit. Scott said that crafts beyond animation writing will be fighting against issues, including tight schedules, “unit rates being abused, and wages just across the board being unlivable and unreasonable.” The union as a whole is supporting the writers’ campaign for better pay in part because “when a writer is hired on an animated show or sells an animated show and that writer is 839, as long as the show is made in 839’s jurisdiction, it’s also going to be 839,” Scott adds. “That’s what gives us our leverage within the union, and that’s what makes us strong within the unions.”
Of course, after a major social media push and an unprecedented strike authorization vote, the last-minute tentative deal for a Basic Agreement that IATSE struck with the AMPTP in October sharply divided members of the 13 affected West Coast Local unions. While the deal eventually passed in a delegate vote, it failed in the popular vote. Members of TAG say that they’re not worried about the same kind of division in their Local. “I believe that the Local 839 negotiating committee has the support of its membership, and I think anybody that is hoping to find cracks in the group will not find them,” says Uhley. “I think everybody is on the same page. We want things to change. I think things have not been changed, they’ve been status quo for too long.”
Wolkoff notes that, prior to negotiations, he was so impressed with how TAG was engaging with the membership that he decided to get more involved, phone-banking and helping with membership reach-out. “The challenge of the Animation Guild is that, unlike the WGA, the Animation Guild represents many different crafts of animation and writers are only one part of that. The Animation Guild, I know, is determined to strike a better deal for all animation artists, not just writers,” he says, adding, “I feel confident that this is going to be an inflection year for them.”
