The technology wage theft scandal has been expanded to visual effects studios:
A new class action lawsuit on behalf of VFX workers just been filed in the Northern California District Court against the biggest names in the industry, including Walt Disney Animation, Dreamworks Animation, Sony Pictures, as well as the two original “Techtopus” conspirators — LucasFilm and Pixar.
For those who need a reminder, top CEOs in Silicon Valley, including the likes of media darling Steve Jobs, conspired to suppress the wages of thousands and thousand of Silicon Valley employees:
This should be a nice reminder that no matter how good a programmer you are, your company has structural incentives to treat you just as poorly as it can get away with. And your individual talent wont save you. The engineers here were specifically targeted because they were among the best engineers, and thus the most likely to demand higher salaries. Essentially, every dollar that goes to a worker is a dollar that Wall Street will not reward the CEO for. Even if you as a CEO want to reward the people who made the company, the pressure to not do so can be immense.
The CEO of Market Basket was temporarily fired because he spent too much money on the employees, despite the fact that the company was immensely successful. Not even good financial performance is enough to keep the wall street wolves at bay. The workers eventually got the good CEO replaced through work actions, but the story is still chilling. Significant portions of the management of that company were willing to risk ruining a great business over the idea that the employees were treated too well.
There is a myth in Silicon Valley, that engineers are special, are unique. That they don’t have to worry about the normal employer-employee dynamics because they are special. The wage theft case from Silicon Valley should show them that, no, as far as their companies and the structural incentives or late stage capitalism are concerned, they are no different than burger flippers. When people think like this:
The old Silicon Valley anti-unionism came from narrow corporate self-interest; the new seems more broadly ideological.
“The notion that ‘These workers are expendable’ is a fundamentally different attitude toward workers than ‘Let’s make sure they have these benefits so they don’t want to unionize,'” Berlin said.
there is no person they don’t see as expendable. Silicon Valley workers should see the wage theft scandal as the canary in the coal mine that it is and realize they have a lot more in common with the person that cleaned Steve Job’s office than they do with Steve Jobs.
Angry Architect 