A letter will accompany this distribution informing the class members that this is the first of two distributions and is approximately half of their total distribution. The letter will also identify the class member’s “work state” for tax purposes, pursuant to the data provided to the claims administrator by Defendants, and provide instructions on how to correct the work state by July 31, 2018 if it is not correct. The second distribution with the remaining proceeds will be made in August 2018 and will include the tax documents (e.g., Form W-2 and Form 1099), reflecting any updated work state.
The money is coming from The Walt Disney Company/Pixar/Lucasfilm/Imagemovers Digital, which settled for $100 million; Dreamworks Animation, which settled for $50 million; Sony Pictures, which settled for $13 million; and 21st Century Fox-owned Blue Sky Studios, which settled for $5.95 million. Most animation workers who were employed at those companies between 2004 and 2010 qualify to receive a portion of the settlement. The list of qualifying job titles can be found here.
The lawsuit was sparked after it became clear that animation studios had colluded for years to set salary limits and avoid hiring artists from other studios, thereby circumventing the free market for the skills and talents of their employees.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit presented substantial evidence that implicated Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president Ed Catmull as a ringleader of the illegal wage-fixing scheme. The Walt Disney Company has done nothing to reprimand or punish Catmull for his questionable actions, and he continues to serve as the leader for both Disney and Pixar animation studios.
Cartoon Brew covered the wage-theft lawsuit for two-and-a-half years. All of the earlier articles about the lawsuit can be read here.
dbx99 on June 29th, 2018 at 02:57 UTC »
I am a member of this class action lawsuit. (At last report, there are 11,000 members in this suit) I worked at Dreamworks for nearly a decade so I am covered in the time period for which this lawsuit addresses.
The case itself is very clear on an evidence-standpoint. Ed Catmull, the head of Pixar, made several published public statements not only admitting to but bragging and justifying this illegal practice of colluding with these top studio execs to not hire from each other's labor pool in order to suppress wages and suppress worker mobility. Here is a good source that outlines the scheme and the broad reach that affected workers within animation but also beyond the entertainment industry and all the way to high tech industries: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/ed-catmull-on-wage-fixing-i-dont-apologize-for-this-105855.html
I do know of people who were surprised that despite talent and achievement, were not processed through a hiring process. Dreamworks and Disney are about 5 minutes from each other in Glendale and Burbank.
What these top execs did is a morally evil thing. They acted in full knowledge that they were violating federal anti-trust laws. They did it deliberately to save money and by fucking over their own artists who poured their passion, their best years of their lives, to give their best effort to put out great work.
While the timeframe of the lawsuit covers approximately 6-7 years, the lawsuit is an offshoot of the even larger "High Tech lawsuit" where Google, Apple, and other high tech silicon valley companies did the exact same thing (Remember, Steve Jobs ran Pixar for some time). This made this lawsuit a lot easier for the plaintiff lawyers to pursue in court. This is why the plaintiff attorney fees were reduced to $18M by the judge after they had initially asked for over $38M. The bulk of the legal groundwork had already been laid down so they didn't have to do as much work to present their case.
This is nothing less than wage theft. Worse - career theft. People never got to enjoy their full opportunity because of this cartel controlling things like an unbelievable conspiracy theory. These companies are settling for what seems like a huge amount of money but it is still just a fraction of what they likely saved by implementing this covert, illegal scheme of unifying against the workers.
The animation artists at Disney and Dreamworks had a labor union (Local 839a, Animation Guild) yet that did not help because this pattern of corporate malfeasance was done covertly. Sony, Blue Sky, Pixar are not union shops so they were probably even more screwed over by a variety of other practices beyond this particular one.
It's a really fucked up situation when talented artists are screwed over for a decade. That's a whole career for some. It was for me.
I came from a videogame 3D art background and put a few years in digital visual effects before moving onto feature animation. The people I worked with were great and dedicated.
Today Dreamworks sold out to Comcast and they laid off most of its USA artists in favor of offshored labor in China and India. American animation (and our friends in VFX) gets beaten up by unethical executives all the time with no real consequences.
BadWolfman on June 29th, 2018 at 00:25 UTC »
$170 million seems like a lot, right?
I copied the list of elligible in-class job titles into Excel, and it's 2,117 long. That's only JOB TITLES. According to IMDb, over 1,700 visual effects crew members worked on Avengers: Infinity War.
Once again, VFX workers get screwed.
The104Skinney on June 29th, 2018 at 00:01 UTC »
So on average, how much is each person estimated to receive?