November 7th – IBEW Informational Meeting

Last week IBEW Local 40 held an informational meeting in Burbank for Visual Effects Artists. We are working on a story/podcast with them but in the meantime they have announced details about another meeting on Sunday November 7th at 1pm at The American Legion Hall located at 5309 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Culver City, CA 90230.

Representatives from both Local 40 and the IBEW will be there to answer questions and provide additional information and the meeting is open to all Visual Effects Practitioners in Southern California.

4 thoughts on “November 7th – IBEW Informational Meeting”

  1. I’m sorry, but what does the IBEW (the international brotherhood of electrical workers) have anything to do with VFX, 2D & 3D animation, compositing, et al.?

    I’m an animator in the motion graphics industry. 5 years ago, in 2005, I wanted to explore joining the Animation Union. Though motion graphics in its current form is still a nascent industry, it’s been around in one form or another since the dawn of television.

    1. Double post – this was also posted in another article.

      Do you have an understanding of how unions work? Did they represent the company you worked for? Accepting your dues with no contract in place would have been much worse in my opinion.

      I tried to contact you when you posted at first a few days ago but deleted your post because it was from a made up email and domain so I could not contact you for clarification. I worry about “five years ago I… ” posts not adding much to this very serious conversation. They are interested now and it might be wise to listen to what they have to say.

  2. The first sentence of this comment is unique to this thread. I posted the comment here because it is equally valid, and for some readers, who click on this thread and not the other, the comment would be viewed, and hopefully, an intelligent discussion would follow. I am not aware of an internet comment rule-book that says you can post similar comments in similar threads that speak earnestly toward a topic. Even your reply to my comment doesn’t readily identify the article to which my double comment applies. Isn’t it easier just to reprint my words here than make people chase links to read something that deals with the same subject matter? Not all readers read every quick take at fxguide.

    That said… (reprint alert!)

    There’s no reason to discount a comment simply for choosing to remain anonymous. There’s an enthusiastic vibrancy to the web’s ecosystem of comments and a lot of it is due to comments being able to, at times, be posted anonymously.

    Most fundamentally, it allows for people to be wrong. (see 4chan article in Wired magazine)

    That said, there’s really no reason to question my individual competency or knowledge of “how unions work”. At their core, Unions are meant to represent their members mutual economic and social interests. Check out the Freelancers’s Union here.

    When you say “they are interested now” what do you mean exactly? Who is interested, and what are they saying? There is nothing in your comment that indicates what you mean.

    Concerning your desire to further discount my comment by claiming it’s somehow obsolete because the experience it describes is five years old. That just doesn’t make any sense. Regardless of when the experience happened, its factuality remains. The reason I mentioned the timeframe was to acknowledge that time has passed, and maybe things are different now; that, and to show that this has been an issue for all animators for a long time. If my personal experience has anything to do with it, I can add that two cents to the pot.

    To oblige your need for currentness. I just contacted the Animation Guild. Literally. Today. Five minutes ago. They are very nice. However, once again, I had to explain to the first person I spoke to what Motion Graphics Animation was. It was like having a word for word conversation repeated back to me five years later. It felt as if nothing had changed.

    Fortunately, this time, I was able to be connected with Steve Kaplan.

    Steve spoke with me at length about the state of the industry, and said that I was unable to join the animation guild/union voluntarily as an individual. They have a facility focused infrastructure, not an artist focused infrastructure. Basically, the way their individual union is setup, you’d have to already be employed at a facility that has an agreement with them, and you’d be obligated to join, It’s just not in their current system’s dna to do it the other way around.

    Where does that leave the entire freefloating freelancing vfx, design, animation and motion graphics industry? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know. Join the industry non-specific freelancers union?

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