This is a throwaway account because I have telling infos on my main.
I just need to vent and see if anyone else experienced this. This is also going to be long.
TLDR; I felt exploited in a company, didn't get a raise despite me doing so much for the company. I jumped ship, got better pay and healthier work conditions, joined a freelance community in my field and collaborated on a lot of amazing projects. The former boss got mad when we prospered, went crazy paranoid, which led to him currently losing more and more employees.
I was hired by a small animation company (let's call them company A) in my country (somewhere in Asia) a few years back. I was mainly hired as middle management, but the job description was not totally clear. The main requirement was fluency in a foreign language (I'm trilingual) as the clients we handled were overseas, and some translation work was needed before people in production could work on it. The owner was also a foreigner, who spoke a bit of English but he still needed me as an interpreter most times.
My fluency in the client's language was intermediate, so I made up for it by doing my best in other managerial and administrative work. It is also important to note that I was the only other person in management besides the actual CEO. The rest were the animators themselves, and an accountant who came in once a month. So besides translation work, I was doing recruitment, social media management, some bookkeeping, paying any company bills, communicating and doing the paperwork concerning pertinent government agencies (like the tax bureau, city hall, labor departments) and banks, as well as running errands (like buying tissue paper for the toilet and such). Besides this I also helped the owner with his personal things, like communicating with his landlord, assisting him to doctor's appointments, renewing his visa… you get it. When we expanded, I scouted locations and negotiated with the leasing department. I befriended the lessor, sent gifts from my own money, and got us a huge discount for the office space. I did not hate my job, I was good at it. I cared for the company and wanted it to grow, which was my mistake.
I started entertaining the thought of leaving when I got covid. (And I most likely got it from work-related tasks, as I had to go to government offices and banks. I never went anywhere else besides home and work that month.) It was not severe so I could still work from home, and translated production materials while hooked on an oxygen tank. I couldn't work the normal hours since I was, you know, sick, and the CEO made a huge deduction on my pay. From then my health took a toll, both mental and physical, and I did the bare minimum. Especially when I asked for a tiny raise (about 8%) and was denied due to my poor health. I started planning my exit, and looked for other companies.
I got in touch with a former employee, and he connected me to someone that eventually led to me finding my next job. It was also in animation, but less on the admin side, and more as a production assistant. It had higher pay and was a remote job, but with a lower “rank”. I was fine with that.
Once I passed the interview, I sent my 30 day notice. I also found out I was pregnant, so that sealed the deal for me. I had to work from home, especially during the pandemic. The CEO offered me the raise that I asked for, but I turned it down. He raised it again to more than my asking price from before, and I turned it down again. It felt liberating. He finally accepted my resignation, so we started scouting for my replacement. And surprise surprise, he realized he now needed 2 people for the position, as one will not be enough for the workload I was doing. So I interviewed some people, found 2 people, and trained them. (I should also probably note that when I started, I was trained for a day, and figured out the rest on my own.) I also secretly started training at night for the new company. Sadly, the overwork led to a miscarriage. The CEO of company A then asked me, if this changes anything for me, and if I would be willing to stay in the company. That question only made me want to leave more. Nonetheless, I parted ways with the owner cordially. We had a nice little chat on the last day and wished each other the best.
Weeks later, I was performing well as production assistant in the new company (company B), I was happy and earning enough to provide for my family. I even got promoted to production manager within less than a year. Then some news came in from an ex-colleague… The former boss found out where I ended up, and was furious (he regarded the company I was in as a competitor, although company B never heard of company A except from my resume). Coincidentally, after my resignation from previous company (company A), several others started resigning as well. A lot of them started freelancing, and we ended up in the same online circles and communities, and collaborated from time to time with projects (company B accepted freelance work, and also did not mind their full time staff doing outside projects). We sometimes discuss how much our lives improved after leaving company A, both financially and personally. A lot of them were happy with the creative freedom alone.
Former boss started fuming. He started holding regular meetings with his staff, saying how freelancing is “evil”, how company B was “evil” and how their skills would not improve outside of company A. He revised employment contracts to prohibit employees from doing “outside freelance jobs”, badmouthing me and other former employees. He started saying that animators should not be focused on money, but on passion. Which is absolute BS because he exploits the cheap labor in our country, and pays his staff less than a quarter of online market rates. The whole reason his staff started doing some freelance work was, their pay was not enough to lead decent lives.
More of his employees quit. Some joined company B, some found other companies in the same field, a lot went into freelance. He then started threatening us (former employees) with lawsuits about poaching. We weren't really scared since… well… a lot of them are mostly freelancers. They weren't tied to any company. His next threat was about us evading business taxes… which again… we weren't. He thought our online community was a business… and we aren't. We are freelancers, or people who come from different studios, we just collaborate on projects from time to time. Which is how most big animation productions work.
We also got to collaborate on a lot of bigger animated series in Asia, as a lot of bigger studios outsource jobs to us when their in-house team was not enough. Our names started showing up on end credits, which drove the former boss to obsess over our “evilness” further, and started grilling his current employees about us more (like if we were keeping in touch with them or not, are we poaching them, has any of them worked with us… and some of them do secretly, as their salary is nowhere near enough). His paranoia got so bad that one of his assistants started visiting the dormitories of the staff (about 95% of staff can only afford shared housings) and asked things like “hey why do you have your own drawing tablet, do you work freelance?” Former boss also started saying things like “Those who left are incompetent, I don't know how they got into these series, they will probably be blacklisted as they are not upto industry standards. Our company's way is better.” His company morale dropped further since his employees are mostly our friends, and the attendance plummeted. He then made a huge salary penalty on tardiness and absences, which made things even worse. More quit, and he couldn't fire any of those left even when the performance was horrendous. He is hiring more and more inexperienced staff as of this moment.
I don't know how to feel, I left company A with minimal hard feelings. I know I gave that company my best, so I have no regrets. I feel bad sometimes, but I mostly feel furious for his animators and how he badmouths those who helped him build his company (the ones in the animation circle are mostly previous trainers for company A who were there since the early years). I am furious about how I ensured that company A's management duo were ready by the time I left, and I sometimes wish I just went AWOL and let the company burn.
The animation circles I am in just really want to help out those who feel trapped, exploited and limited in animation companies who think they can get away with cheap pay just because we live in a third world country. We give each other feedbacks, sometimes free translations, and pass projects to one another. We sometimes guide beginners in the field, and we also get to ask people with more experience for advice, and share resources. It's quite wholesome. We want to learn as much as we can in the industry by meeting animators from different countries, contribute without limiting creative freedom, without needing to stick to being “starving artists” when we know what our worth is.
And personally, I've never been happier.