In its earliest days, Disney was too small to attract any notice from labor efforts a handful of artists exiled from Kansas working in a medium seen as a novelty wasn’t worth expending energy over. These battles passed Walt Disney Productions by. The Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and the Screen Writers Guild (later to split into the WGA East and West) were all founded in the 30s, and they doggedly fought Hollywood studios to win equitable pay, protection against exploitation, and safe working conditions.
The Great Depression and the labor-friendly administration of FDR helped inspire more union activity during the 1930s than the previous 50 years. In labor strife, as in so much else, Disney’s timetable did not match the rest of Hollywood’s. Because of this strike, art, design, and animation would never be the same. A momentous enough event in the field that animator Tom Sito has dubbed it the “ Civil War of Animation,” the effects of this strike went beyond working conditions. And in the world of animation, there’s no greater evidence of artists’ ability to organize and achieve results as a group than the Disney animators’ strike of 1941. A cursory glance at some of the working conditions actors were subjected to in the early days of Hollywood is proof enough of the need for a union. That the threat of a strike led by the IATSE this year forced producers to offer a deal should put to rest the notion that unions have no utility in the arts (though the agreement reached is, as of this writing, tentative). Disney animator Ward Kimball, a lifelong liberal, once remarked that “artists are notoriously poor union members an artist has his own ego that he’s more important as an individual than as a member of a group.” Besides arguments that they aren’t beneficial or necessary, there are the old cliches about artists and their poor business sense and temperament.
It’s hardly the first time someone’s doubted the efficacy of unions for art and entertainment. “It’s not that type of work,” he said, or words to that effect. In this case, he felt that, while unions were vital to some professions, they didn't have anything to offer the arts.
This friend, knowing my ongoing chase of work in film or animation, was never shy about volunteering his opinions on the industry. Once while visiting with a friend, we somehow stumbled onto the topic of unions.
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