Wage Information

What people make has long been a touchy subject. If you're of a certain age, you were taught it wasn't polite to ask about somebody's weekly salary.

But think about it: if you've got no idea what others at the studio/company/plant are making, how're you gonna know what YOU should be asking for? The New York Times has noted of late how the hunger for salary information has grown:

... [Columnist Alison] Green recently asked readers of her “Ask A Manager” website to share their job title, where they live and how much they make each year. Answers were anonymous; the data was compiled in a spreadsheet on Ms. Green’s website so people could sort through the data.

Within a half-hour, she had 1,000 responses. A day later, so many people posted their salaries her website froze. So far, three weeks later, she has more than 26,000 responses, everything from an accountant in Chicago who makes $90,000 to a librarian in Austin who earns $39,000. She was surprised by the overwhelming response: Previous surveys in 2014 and 2017 garnered a fraction of interest, fewer than 2,700 comments apiece. ...

Liz Dolan, the host of the podcast “Safe for Work” and a former marketing chief at Nike and the Oprah Winfrey Network, said she used to believe that salary information should be private.

“Now I see it is about secrecy, and that is a bad thing,” she said. ...

Some states and cities protect the sharing of wage information. California enshrined the right of employees to publish and share salary information decades ago, yet for a long time in the 1990s Disney required that salaries of animation artists be kept confidential, and studio administrators instructed employees not to let other employees know what they made.

The practice only ended when the Animation Guild pushed back on the practice and made an issue of it.

Los Angeles animators, writers, bord artists and technicians have shared wage details for years, and the Animation Guild has published them. Why fly blind about where salaries are in t he cartoon bi if you don't have to? Knowledge is power. And in times like these, working stiffs can use all the power they can get.