With Business Booming, Cartoonists Are Animated About Their Union : Competition: Concerned jobs could be exported to cheaper foreign markets, artists try to protect wages by organizing workers abroad.

Worried about the nagging runaway production problem, rank-and-file entertainment workers across Hollywood are railing against the Canadian film industry and other foreign markets for taking movie and TV jobs out of the local economy.

But at the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists--the animators’ guild--union bosses are employing an entirely different strategy: Instead of fighting foreign competition, animators are trying to unite with them.

Recently, from its offices on Lankershim Boulevard, the animators union has made overtures to cartoon artists worldwide--in Paris, Mexico City, Toronto and even Minsk, Belarus. The union’s plan, explained President Tom Sito, is to help overseas artists organize, which will lead to higher wages, giving Hollywood producers less incentive to leave their hometown.

“We’ve learned that you can’t build walls around L.A. and that foreign competition is a serious issue,” Sito said. “So, as they say, ‘Workers of the world unite!’ ”

So far global solidarity has been a mixed success, Sito said. A growing number of animators in Vancouver and Paris, helped by L.A. union officials, are trying to organize, Sito said. But despite several conversations with Japanese artists and even a trip to Tokyo, Japanese animators aren’t unionizing any time soon, officials said.

While animation may be a labor intensive profession at times, with long hours hunched over drawing tables and fingers stained blue with ink, there’s nothing working-class about the pay at local studios. With ‘toons hot right now both on TV and at the movies, the average animator at a major studio earns $80,000 to $100,000 per year, with the top of the heap making upward of $500,000, Sito said.

Part of the reason behind the fat paychecks is the strength of the union. Formed in 1938, the union represents three-quarters of Hollywood’s full-time animators with local membership steady at 2,500 for the past five years, Sito said. Nowadays all of the major studios are union shops.

Membership includes every slice of the cartoon world from scriptwriters to character artists to background painters to “in-betweeners,” the workers who fill in cartoon character movements between key poses.

Cartoonists haven’t gone on strike since 1982, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t sticky negotiating sessions. Top issues include protecting overtime pay, trying to limit how much work studios ship out to cheaper foreign markets like Mexico and Korea and the yearly battle for residuals.

Though animators are considered creative talent like directors, writers and actors, they don’t get paid any residuals or percentages of gross sales. Each year Sito tries to persuade studios to include residuals in collective bargaining agreements. Each year he is turned down.

Richard Levin, a labor relations executive at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, says individual residuals for animators get too complicated when there are as many as 400 artists working on one film.

“I don’t see it ever happening,” Levin said.

Still, residuals aside, it’s a fine time to be penning cartoons. The late 1980s marked an animation renaissance, fueled by the popularity of “The Simpsons” on TV and movies like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Since then, salaries have been steadily climbing, Sito said, though this year the overall downturn in Hollywood production has slowed the momentum a bit.

“It’s still a hot job market though the demand for artists has shifted from movies to prime time,” explained Michael Wolf, a senior vice president at Film Roman Inc., the independent animation company in North Hollywood that produces “The Simpsons.” “Today every network has its own prime-time animated series, which keeps this a healthy business.”

Film Roman, with 330 employees, is one of the biggest nonunion shops in town. It offers similar health-care and retirement benefits as the union and pays above union-set minimum salary levels, Wolf said.

“With so many good jobs out there that are nonunion, there’s really no reason to join,” said Anthony Lioi, a director at Film Roman who’s not in the union.

But for some animators, runaway production is chipping away at their often taken-for-granted sense of security. It pays to be in a union in times like these, said Cathy Feraday, a Canadian artist recruited by the Glendale-based animation division of DreamWorks SKG several years ago.

“When I go back to Canada and see my animation friends working long hours without getting paid and getting laid off for no reason, it makes me think,” Feraday said. “I guess over the years I have become a real union cheerleader.”