WAGE FIXING!

And boy, did our fine conglomerates ever believe there were wages needing to be fixed:

... "Workers contend that the roots of the anti-poaching agreements go back to the mid-1980s, when George Lucas and Ed Catmull, the president of Steve Jobs’ newly formed company Pixar, agreed to not raid each other’s employees." ...

Okay, it might have started in the eighties among the tech companies (tech geniuses are nothing if not controlling), but wage suppression in animation got kicked into high gear in the early oughts, when Dr. Catmull and friends allegedly conspired to suppress the hiring of animation employees from other studios. (The motivation, I think, was to avoid the bidding wars and high salaries of the go-go nineties).

I received numerous complaints from artists about companies wanting to hire them ... and then (whattayaknow!) suddenly NOT wanting to hire them, just as soon as they found out said artists were employed by a rival company. (Kindly note that these artists were not under Personal Service Contracts, and therefore free to offer their services to all comers).

In 2014, employees at DreamWorks filed a lawsuit over the anti-poaching and wage suppression shenanigans of the major studios. Sometime after, the Animation Guild held a meeting with one of the lawsuit's attorneys. Afterwards, the lawyer told me about being in the room for Ed Catmull's and George Lucas's depositions regarding an earlier wage suppression case:

"They both acknowledged collusion was going on. George Lucas was matter-of-fact about it. Ed Catmull was hostile and defensive. He thought he was doing the right thing for the industry." ...

In the weeks and months following the visit from the attorney, the Guild collected names of possible litigants and forwarded them to the legal eagles on the case. Sometime after, this led to the Guild getting slapped with subpoenas for documents and e-mails. I got depositioned by the companies and questioned about what I knew about the wage suppression thingie, and when did I know it. The consensus of the lawyers was that Disney and the rest of the studios were trying to establish that people had known about the conspiracy for years, and the suit was untimely. (Apparently the untimeliness defense didn't fly with the judge).

So now, judging by the reports, Diz Co. is the last defendant ready to settle, bringing total dollars paid by the studios to just under $169 million. It's not near what damaged employees should have received, but likely what they'll end up with.