The Vulture on the VFX union in Hollywood
These assholes use every trick in the book to avoid paying people a fair wage. For example:
“After Mark Patch (a veteran visual-effects technician with a long list of credits including Tenet, 2016’s Ghostbusters, and Starz’s American Gods) was offered a short-term position working on VFX for a Marvel series on Disney+, he says the studio balked at paying him his going rate — demanding to first see a pay stub from his work on Tenet proving his market value, then undershooting Patch’s quote by several hundred dollars a week.”
“A month after the findings of the poll were posted on Instagram, Marvel began staffing a Disney+ show in Atlanta. Applicants with knowledge of the poll subsequently asked for salaries higher than what Marvel had previously offered them and stuck to their monetary demands as a group. “Marvel just kept saying to applicants, ‘No, no, no, we can’t,’” the Georgia-based VFX worker says. “Eventually, they burned through everyone they could. And Marvel was like, ‘Where are they getting these numbers?’ A producer showed them the rate poll. And almost instantly, there was an email that went out to producers and executives at Marvel that asked, ‘Where is this coming from? How do we stop it? Because we can’t have people talking about rates.’”