Over the past couple of years, stories have come out about what a miserable experience it is to work on visual effects for a Marvel movie or TV show, with artists complaining about low pay, shoddy management, and terrible working conditions. It may surprise you to hear that despite how important they are to modern movie-making, VFX workers are one of the few groups of workers in Hollywood not represented by a union, so they don’t really have the ability to protest their situation, or at least not in a way that the studios will take seriously.
According to Vulture, members of Marvel’s on-set VFX crew are looking to change that. Fifty out of 52 members filed a petition to unionize under IATSE, the organization that represents behind-the-scenes crew on movies and TV shows.
In a statement, organizer Mark Patch said that “workers in the visual-effects industry have been denied the same protections and benefits their coworkers and crewmates have relied upon since the beginning of the Hollywood film industry.” He characterized the petition as “a historic first step for VFX workers coming together with a collective voice demanding respect for what we do.”
There is no union for VFX workers in Hollywood…yet
Obviously there are a lot more than 50 people working on VFX in Hollywood. The group that filed the petition is made up mostly of “data wranglers, production managers, witness camera operators, and assistants” who work on Marvel projects. This doesn’t include the armies of special effects artists bent over their computers all day. But the idea is that once this “relatively small yet high-profile group” at Marvel gets the ball rolling, others could follow.
And this is happening while Hollywood is dealing with strikes by both the actors unions and writers unions. Clearly, Hollywood is going through a bit of a labor crisis right now. We’re hoping the industry comes out of this in a more equitable place. The CEOs can definitely give up some of their sky-high compensation packages to address the pay issue, at least:
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h/t The A.V. Club