Three Animation Guild Negotiating Committee Members Say They’re Voting “No” on Controversial Tentative Deal
Tensions over The Animation Guild’s controversial new tentative contract spilled into public view on Tuesday as the ratification vote for the deal began.
Three members of the union’s sprawling negotiating committee posted on social media that they personally will be voting “no” on the tentative contract that they helped to bargain, primarily due to concerns about provisions covering generative AI. But that same day, the union’s chief negotiator said the agreement improved on recent deals “by a good margin” and warned that not ratifying the agreement could be “dangerous,” risking losing more work in Los Angeles.
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The Animation Guild’s 56-person negotiating committee consisted of a “table team” of 29 members that met across the table with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and a support team of 27 members. Both teams weighed in on proposals and changes to proposals, but only the table team voted on the tentative agreement — and largely voted favor of the deal. Two of the negotiating committee members that posted on Tuesday were part of the support team, while one served on the table team.
“I believe the AI and outsourcing protections in this contract are not strong enough — and in my opinion — could lead to the loss of lots of jobs,” Mitchell vs. The Machines writer-director Mike Rianda posted on Instagram on Tuesday. Adding that there were gains in the contract, like pay increases and health benefits improvements, Rianda argued that the pact’s A.I. protections give “sole power to the employer to make us use A.I. however they see fit.”
The contract also does not contain outsourcing protections, Rianda said, because “we tried to get staffing minimums but the AMPTP blocked us.”
Fellow negotiating committee member and writer Joey Clift (PAW Patrol, Spirit Rangers) likewise explained that he was voting “no” in a series of posts on Bluesky and on X because the contract doesn’t resolve member concerns over AI. “We fought tooth and nail and received a few small AI protections in this contract, but these aren’t the strong, common sense AI guardrails we need to keep animation workers protected,” Clift wrote.
The My Little Pony: Make Your Mark writer Kelly Lynne D’Angelo, who also served on the negotiating committee, said she is voting “no” on Bluesky and on X: “I’ll go into further details soon, but it boils down to the fact to me, we still need to fight for more AI protections.” She added, “Voting ‘No’ could give us the leverage we need to actually get substantial gains. Does it mean we may lose other things negotiated? Yes. But do those things trump more needs in AI, outsourcing, and staffing minimums? That’s YOUR call to make. This vote needs to be overwhelmingly ‘No’ to do that.”
The union’s negotiations, led by the AMPTP’s Tracy Cahill and The Animation Guild’s business representative Steve Kaplan, concluded with a tentative deal on Nov. 22 after months of talks.
In an interview on Tuesday, Kaplan emphasized that the deal not only offers gains earned by other unions earlier in the industry’s negotiating cycle — outsized wage minimum increases, adjustments to fringe benefits, additional sick days and paid bereavement leave — but also addresses Animation Guild-specific concerns. The union secured, for instance, the removal of flat-rate payments for certain crafts, increased rates and staffing minimums for writers and removed three classifications for storyboard artists with paltry minimum rates.
“If you could do an apples-to-apples comparison to the gains that were achieved over the last few cycles, this agreement certainly outweighs its predecessors by a good margin,” said Kaplan. “And for that reason alone members should take into consideration ratification to see those gains not only applied but some of them applied retroactively all the way back to the end of the previous agreement.”
Addressing the concerns of members over AI, Kaplan said that the negotiating team walked into talks with the AMPTP acknowledging that the use of AI and machine learning in animation has been happening “for some time,” but with concerns about the data used to train these tools and how the technology can generate content. “We found alignment with the producers in some ways with our concerns,” Kaplan says, noting that while the union was preoccupied with the ethics of training data, producers were focused on the ability to monetize non-copyrightable material.
Kaplan says the guild hit a wall when it came to its attempts to have more control over the implementation and use of generative AI. Studios were concerned, he said, with non-signatory studios using the technology and gaining a competitive edge. “We are able to achieve language about consultation as well as the same meetings [as other unions secured] and ability to claim that the work that is happening, even though it’s using an AI process, it’s still covered under the terms of the agreement and therefore it’s still union work.” He argues that generative AI is still in its infancy and studios are still wrestling with how to use it.
The union’s ratification voting period ends on Dec. 22. If members support the deal in a ratification vote, the contract will soon take effect. If they reject the deal, the Animation Guild and the AMPTP will go back to the bargaining table and attempt again to reach a compromise, with a strike potentially on the table.
If the deal is not ratified, Kaplan says, negotiators would then lose certain parts of the agreement that are conditional upon ratification and would have to identify what members would need to be able to ratify the agreement.
He adds, “We would have to do our best in order to quickly achieve that, which risks not fully educating the membership, then undertake negotiations and threaten to stop Los Angeles from working and exacerbate an already-established practice of moving work to incentivized areas that would be out of the reach of the agreement.” He concludes, “So it is a dangerous thing to not ratify because the opposite does not guarantee we will keep what we have and could possibly end up harming the ability for members to work here in Los Angeles.”
Dec. 10, 6:56 p.m. Updated with interview with Steve Kaplan.
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