A court filing on Tuesday found that Disney has agreed to settle a lawsuit which claimed that they were in violation of antitrust laws. As reported by Variety, the animation workers claimed Disney, Pixar, and Lucasfilm had conspired “to set animation wages via non-poaching agreements.” Now through a settlement fund, Disney will pay $100 million dollars to the affected animators and visual effects employees.
According to the effected workers, this has been a long, on going problem that stems all the way back to the 1980s. The workers claim the problem started “when George Lucas and Ed Catmull, the president of Steve Jobs’ newly formed company Pixar, agreed to not raid each other’s employees.” Eventually, other companies joined the agreement to not poach employees. The workers claimed that the animation studios would call each other to notify when they were making an offer on an employee. This was to make sure they were not increasing “the compensation offered to the prospective employee in its offer if the company currently employing the employee made a counteroffer.”
In 2015, a similar case was settled by employees from Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel. Those companies agreed to pay $415 million dollars.
A U.S. District Court has scheduled a hearing on the Disney settlement for March 9th, 2017.
Credit: Variety
Photo Credit: Walt Disney Animation
