In a world increasingly plagued with exploitative corporations squeezing employees for time and labour without appropriately compensating them, collective action is absolutely necessary for upholding workers’ rights and ensuring good working conditions. Hollywood has already had to publicly deal with both the Writers’ Guild of America and the Screen Actors’ Guild striking simultaneously in efforts to secure fair pay, and now a new union is entering the fray. On Monday, visual effects crews at Marvel Studios filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a unionisation election to be represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).
This is a huge deal. Marvel Studios has famously overworked and underpaid its visual effects workers for years, which is absurd considering its movies often gross upwards of a billion dollars, with two grossing over two billion. It’s well-known that most of Marvel’s movies are made with heavy VFX, with actors often sitting in entirely green spaces and trying to act their asses off with nobody and nothing else around them. According to VFX Company Industrial Light & Magic, Avengers: Infinity War has 2,700 shots, and only 80 of them didn’t feature any visual effects.
That means less than three percent of the movie was made without visual effects. It’s astounding, but it also makes perfect sense – out of all the cast and crew working on a movie, the visual effects specialists are the easiest to exploit, because unlike most crew members, they don’t have a union to protect them. This has left them vulnerable to labour shortages, crunch, and a lack of benefits such as paid overtime and healthcare. The industry has been mostly non-union since the 1970s visual effects boom created a need for these artists, making this attempt to organise historic.
“Turnaround times don’t apply to us, protected hours don’t apply to us, and pay equity doesn’t apply to us,” says VFX coordinator Bella Huffman in IATSE’s announcement. “Visual effects must become a sustainable and safe department for everyone who’s suffered far too long and for all newcomers who need to know they won’t be exploited.”
“For almost half a century, 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,” says Mark Patch, VFX organizer for IATSE. “This is a historic first step for VFX workers coming together with a collective voice demanding respect for the work we do.”
Unfortunately, the crew that has signed authorisation cards indicating they want to be represented by the union are on-set workers who work directly for Marvel as data wranglers, production managers, witness camera operators, and assistants. The unionisation will not protect the thousands of VFX artists that work on Marvel movies through third-party VFX studios, but it’s nonetheless an important first step in gaining protections for VFX artists. Union solidarity may extend from here, leading this underappreciated industry to unionise one by one, eventually pushing the industry to treat them like valued workers instead of expendable. Marvel, especially, has always put VFX artists under huge pressure to produce work with untenable deadlines, which is a big reason why fans have noticed plummeting quality of CGI in Marvel movies over time.
In an industry that makes billions, it is inexcusable not to pay the people responsible for bringing your films and television shows to the screen fairly and equitably. Visual effects artists deserve the rights afforded to other unionised departments, and to say otherwise is to say that the people who painstakingly build the films you watch aren’t crucial parts of the filmmaking process. Without them every Marvel movie would be a green screen. I can only hope that this push for unionisation touches the whole industry.