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Animation Guild Contract Closes Gender Pay Gap

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Teri Hendrich Cusumano has entered contract negotiations with major studios in an effort to achieve major wins for animation color designers. These workers choose the color scheme for animated films and TV shows, and traditionally they tend to be women.

They were also paid around $300 less per week than designers who create characters, backgrounds and props. Although she highlighted the gender disparity in her presentations to the Alliance of Film and Television Producers, this argument did not convince employers.

“The studios don’t want to acknowledge that they are discriminating based on gender,” she said. “They just ignore it.”

She also provided testimonials from animation bosses — art directors and showrunners — about the value color designers bring to a project. That argument played out better, she says. The AMPTP did not agree to remove the pay gap for color designers, but reduced it by a third.

The Animation Guild represents 5,000 artists, writers and technicians in the industry. On Tuesday, the union announced that 87% of voting members were in favor of ratifying the new contract with the AMPTP. Turnout was also exceptionally high, with more than two-thirds of eligible people voting.

Since late last year, the union has rallied social media support for a “New Deal for Animation”. This spring, the union also held an in-person rally to show support for members. The final contract doesn’t go as far as some members had hoped, but it does bring additional payoffs, and organizers hope it sets the stage for future talks.

“This is not the change we deserve,” said Mairghread Scott, co-chairman of the union’s writers’ craft committee. “But it’s a bigger change than we’ve seen in a long time.”

Animation writers, who make up less than 10% of the guild, had entered the negotiation hoping to narrow the pay gap between them and live-action writers, who are represented by the Writers Guild of America. For live-action television writers, WGA minimums range from $4,154 to $5,302 per week. The minimum for animation writers under the old contract is just $2,064 per week.

The new deal creates four pay levels for animation writers, with minimums ranging from $1,834 to $2,900 for supervising writers. While it doesn’t come close to what WGA writers do, it does create a career ladder for writers in animation, Scott said.

“In live action, you have this set tier system, where every year someone gets a bump,” she said. But in animation, she said, “most writers will literally work their entire career on one rate.”

Animation workers like to point out that during the pandemic, they were able to continue working from home while live production was shut down. The new contract includes a provision that could allow continued flexibility for remote workers.

Under the old agreement, the workers would no longer be covered by the contract if they left Los Angeles County. The new agreement gives employers the discretion to allow employees to leave the county while still covered by the contract.

The contract also includes three percent raises for each of the three years, matching what other IATSE unions have already received.

“More money is always a proposition that a union will make,” said Steve Kaplan, commercial director of the union. “We made more money, but certainly not as much as we wanted.”

For color designers, the increase will be between 4% and 12% above the annual increases of 3%. Supervisors will also receive an additional 15%.

“It’s an outsized gain,” Hendrich Cusumano said. “We see it as a restitution of wages withheld from a category of workers because of their identity.”