[...]Animation Guild Membership At 25 Year High « VFX Soldier[...]…

project-syndicate.org Are US Multinationals Abandoning America?
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-us-multinationals-abandoning-america-

we live in a world where the manufacturing base of the UK is barely 8%. There is a huge disparity in wealth; more and more employment is service/servile based within an accompanying low wage economy. Wage growth has stagnated over the decades, and this has led low-income workers to take on more and more private debt to fill the gap that an organised living wage used to fill. The TUC has recently published figures showing that levels of unpaid overtime/work have a monetary value of £38 billion per year. And like 1911, we are asked to believe that out of private greed comes public good.

For a generation who assume that because they have grown up with the Net, that the Net is grown up – there remains a void. How can we move from the individual to the collective? We are in the grip of a system that has all but abolished the world of work as we know it, whilst restoring the worst forms of exploitation. It is as though the clock has been wound backwards with employers having complete control over time, and total power over the lives of workers in the form of a zero hours contract. They share a world resonant with the great reserve army of labour that characterised the period before 1911.

We have left the waterfront now, only to be enclosed within the virtualised unrealities of technology and its intangible economy. How do we re-imagine this oppositional spirit in an individual networked age: that sense of creativity and ownership when so much of working life is so completely individualised, chained to an anonymous equation, a unit, a term in a contract?

How do we re-imagine what it is to be human in terms of community, collectivism, sociability and new forms of democracy when human capital has seemingly become fettered within this digitalised world? The similarities between 1911 and 2011 are stark. It is as though in cyber time and movement we are returning to the future. In Liverpool today, the world of the waterfront and the sea has long gone, to be replaced by a far more desperate form of casual labour, with little of the collective strength that fed the city from the river. Is it even possible to talk of a spirit of resistance?

http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/nerve18/casualism.php

Yes, it is true that in terms of absolute total number of animation jobs, there is an increase. But what’s that got to do with unions? Animation has exploded as an industry primarily because of the 3D revolution and all that comes with it. Heck, we probably have 50 million more people in this country since then.

How can you come to a conclusion that unionization did or didn’t send a lot of jobs overseas if the industry itself has grown and changed so much over a quarter century?

I’m not saying what the effects from unions are, only that you cannot make that claim. There are two problems here.

1.) The industry is bigger now all over the world. So, any measurement of animators, whether in a union, not in a union, in school, or unemployed is likely to be much much higher than 25 years ago.

2.). The number of people that belong to guilds does not indicate how many animators there are out there. It is not a good barometer for how many are gainfully employed in this profession. It just tells you how many people happen to work for union shops.

They cover a whole range of professionals in vfx and animation: lighters riggers mattepainters.

I would think that the numbers of animators have grown and tag has had posts showing who is doing what. I’ll post it when I find it.