Amid pressure from Donald Trump’s tariffs, the threat of artificial intelligence and the disruptive influence of streaming services, Canadian animation and visual effects workers in Vancouver are organizing their workplaces to secure their jobs and raise wages.

This year the industry also saw the closure of legendary Hollywood post-production company Technicolour and Canadian animation giant Nelvana Studios, known for classic cartoons like The Care Bears, The Magic School Bus and Arthur, halting production.

“It’s been the toughest slowdown we’ve seen since 2008,” Eddy Pedreira, a 2D animator and president of IATSE Local 938, told PressProgress.

But workers aren’t giving up in the face of economic uncertainty. Last month, workers at Titmouse Animation, the animation studio behind Star Trek: Lower Decks and the Beavis and Butthead reboot, voted 97.6% in favour of ratifying their second collective agreement with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 938, also known as the Canadian Animation Guild.

Their vote comes two months after workers at WildBrain Studios, which produces series like Camp Snoopy and Carmen Sandiego, ratified their first collective agreement with IATSE Local 938, with 73.8% of workers voting in favour of the agreement.

“We’re very happy with the improvements made on the Titmouse agreement,” Pedreira said. “This was our first contract renegotiation, and I think it really drove home how we can build on the bones of a first agreement, even during an industry downturn like this one.”

Local 938 is also currently in bargaining for the first agreement with ICON Animation Studio and is also providing support for negotiations between visual effects studio DNEG and IATSE Local 402, which is focused on organizing workers in BC’s visual effects (VFX) industry. DNEG won the Academy Award for visual effects for Dune: Part Two earlier this year.

In the United States, most film industry trades, including animation and VFX, are unionized with IATSE, Teamsters, and trade-specific guilds like the Writers Guild of America.

Animation and VFX work in Canada, however, has traditionally been largely non-union.

Christopher Leinonen is an animator who has worked at both WildBrain and Titmouse since starting his career in 2007. In that time, he’s worked on a number of animated series including Haunted Hotel and My Little Pony. Leinonen said educating workers about the disparity between what they earn compared to what animators in the US earn was key to getting people interested in unionizing.

“That was a great way to sort of get people on board is to say, ‘look at how much they’re getting paid down there,’” Leinonen told PressProgress. “And they’re getting paid that because they’ve had a union for 70 years where they negotiate the wage up every single year.”

Pedreira said that difficulties in animation and VFX work were long justified as “just the nature” of how things are in Canada, which is generally seen as an outsource industry for Hollywood productions. He said this attitude is leading Canadian workers to devalue their work.

“There was always the impression that because we’re outsourced we should never be asking for better, because the work can leave, because it’s going to get too expensive, without taking into consideration that doing business in Canada is already expensive,” explained Pedreira.

Because it’s largely non-union, there’s been little to no transparency around wages in Canadian animation and VFX, which Pedreira argues contributes to significant differences in wages. Workers who entered the industry during boom times sometimes make more money than workers with more seniority who received few, if any, raises.

Many positions in the film industry, including animation and VFX, are contract-based and tied to a specific movie or show. Jeremy Salter, an international representative for IATSE, told PressProgress that non-union contracts often have termination clauses that favour the employer and leave workers with few rights and little notice in the event of layoffs.

“They know that it’s an industry that does have ups and downs, and layoffs are going to happen, but they want more notice,” said Salter. “They want things like recall rights, so that if they are laid off, and three months later the company starts hiring again, that they have first crack at getting their job back.”

Contract-based work also typically means that when the contract is over, workers lose access to their benefits. IATSE is known for flexible benefit plans tied to union membership rather than to employment, allowing workers who are between contracts to continue accessing their health benefits plan.

IATSE 938 is also advocating for protections around remote work and AI. As many companies, and even some governments, attempt to force workers back to the office full-time, Pedreira said protecting workers’ ability to work remotely is a priority for the union.

While the union is willing to bargain for case-by-case in-office policies, Pedreira said they won’t tolerate “arbitrary enforcement of return-to-office.”

He told PressProgress the ability to work remotely is not just a preference, it’s an important accommodation for disabled and immunocompromised workers. He said the bargaining committee at WildBrain has prioritized accommodations for disabled workers.

When it comes to AI protections, standards around AI use in animation are still being written. Leinonen said the goal in contract negotiations at studios like WildBrain and Titmouse is to guarantee the same protections that American animators in the US-based Animation Guild have secured in their collective agreements.

While workers do not have the right to opt out of using AI or having their work used to train AI systems, these agreements include provisions that protect workers’ pay and film credit from being undermined by AI. Workers must also be notified and consulted on the use of AI in their work.

“I think a lot of people just generally don’t feel that what we got in the WildBrain language, or in the Animation Guild language, goes far enough,” Leinonen said. “A lot of us just want to see an outright ban. … It’s not a lot, but these are the sort of things that we can build on.”

Salter said that with the myriad threats facing Canadian animation and VFX work, it’s an important time for workers to organize.

“These large companies continue to make millions and millions and millions and millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, in profits every year,” Salter said. “It’s time to level the playing field for the workers a little bit so that they can have more of a say, more control and a democratization of their workplace.”

After Salter was hired by IATSE in 2019, one of his first projects was working with animators who had been advocating for better working conditions in the industry through a grassroots organization called the Art Babbitt Appreciation Society. Named after a Disney animator and labour activist who helped lead the 1941 Disney animators strike that forced the company to recognize the Screen Cartoonist’s Guild, the Art Babbitt Appreciation Society formed in response to widespread industry practices that kept animators from being paid for overtime work.

At the time, animators were covered under the ‘HTP exclusion’. “High-technology professionals” are excluded from hours of work, overtime and statutory holiday protections in BC’s Employment Standards Act.

“Employers around the city used to argue that animation workers are high-tech workers, so they were not entitled to overtime pay,” Pedreira noted.

Years of frustration with the HTP exclusion came to a head after the film Sausage Party, produced by Vancouver studio Nitrogen (now owned by Cinesite), was released. Animators flooded the comments section on a Cartoon Brew article about Sausage Party with allegations that they were forced to work unpaid overtime.

The allegations were soon picked up by major news outlets, including The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Though the animators at Nitrogen were not unionized, Unifor Local 2000 brought their case to the BC Employment Standards Branch, which ruled that the animators should not have been covered under the HTP exclusion. Nitrogen was forced to pay retroactive overtime and a $500 fine.

Leinonen said the organizing spurred by the working conditions during the production of Sausage Party demonstrated unions could meaningfully improve working conditions in Vancouver’s animation and VFX industries.

“That was a big change … it was easy to point out and say, ‘the reason why we have overtime protection now is because a union filed a lawsuit,’” said Leinonen.

Since getting involved in the unionization efforts at Titmouse in 2020 and chartering the Canadian Animation Guild in 2021, Pedreira said he and his coworkers have built a union local that’s tailored to the Canadian animation and VFX industries.

“I kind of just get taken back to 2021, putting some handmade posters up at night in the rain, and then looking back at how far we’ve come,” said Pedreira. “I feel like we were driving a car that just started flying.”

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