While the industry as a whole makes a lot, the majority of individual anime and manga make next to nothing. It’s a few very popular properties that make all the dough.
If people were paid fairly, most productions would be untenable. There would be just a few anime per year instead of many.
But also, how would the popular ones come to be? Every new property would be a huge gamble.
As an anime and manga fan, I actually want that to happen. Pay the animators what they deserve. Give them good working conditions.
People just have to accept that means the industry will shrink dramatically. So many things will just never get made.
That also means far fewer people will get to become animators. They’ll have to find some other job as competition for the jobs that remain will be sky high.
And that competition is what brings down the wages in the first place. There are just so many people that want those jobs.
The "if we paid people fairly things would be prohibitively expensive" argument is a terrible one, just to note. First, it rarely seems to actually be the case since the requirement that employees be paid fairly mostly just drives away low-value efforts. It's also an attitude that, if taken to its logical extreme, demands society have an underpaid underclass that suffers so the rest of us can have nice things.
First, there is no such thing as a "fair pay". All of it is driven by demand and supply, always, except when regulations or external factors somehow break things.
Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.
Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close.
Predictions of dire consequences rarely pan out. Fast food employees in Seattle are earning $15-20/+ per hour and prices did not double - in fact they're not significantly higher than in neighboring counties with lower wages. It turns out that labor costs are only a small fraction of overall costs.
Employees also do not have a right to any particular career. That's nice that people have a dream to make anime for a living. I hope they get to realize it. But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want. If you can't make enough money doing a certain job, maybe go get a different job then.
There is no job that is ok to pay nothing or as good as nothing. It doesn't matter what "career".
If a job needs doing by a human at all, then that human does indeed deserve a reasonable baseline which allows them to exist and even do so with reasonable dignity.
As time goes on and jobs are done by machines, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a human, then the output and ownership of those machines simply should one way or another be distributed enough to have the same effect.
All they have to do to earn that is not be being a criminal right at that moment.
And this extends to people who can't do anything obviously productive too. Even a sick old grandma doing nothing but telling stories to kids for one hour a week is productive, and we have no excuse not to provide for even the ones who can't even do that.
Because even if "the Earth is a life boat", we don't exist in an environment of hardship with fixed and insufficient resources where there just isn't enough food and building material and energy to go around.
There simply is no excuse for the way we treat some people. They didn't do anything wrong enough to deserve it, and it is not forced by physical limits.
Talking about what value someone provides to earn their existence is just a way to rationalize taking advantage of others. None of this equates to "I will be forced to spend 20 years learning medicine to give my time away for free to bums!" But even if it did, why is that a bad thing exactly? Because it's what, like slavery? You mean, slavery is bad after all?
These are not slaves. They are free to leave. Nobody is forcing them to work at this job for so little pay. There are plenty of other jobs that pay better. They should go get one of those if they want more money. If enough of them did, the supply of animators would fall and pay would increase.
It doesn't matter if "they are free to leave". There is still no excuse for the employer to pay less than a livable amount for whatever work they get.
If it's 500 freelancers competing for the equivalent of 2 1-day jobs, the employer still has to pay something reasonable for a days work to 2 of them, and nothing to the rest. Or the granularity can be smaller like per hour, but the per hour rate is still some minimum that actually works.
It doesn't matter what the powerless individual worker is ostensibly "free" to do.
Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
There are just plenty of loopholes and a lot of off the clock overtime that complicates things. Not just in anime but most of the Japanese workforce. That's a whole other topic to discuss, though.
A minimum wage doesn't guarantee "a particular wage". It only guarantees that if an exchange of money for labor occurs, that the price paid will meet the minimum. However, it doesn't guarantee that the transaction will occur, and if you're unemployed your "wage" is arguably $0.
I'm not convinced that workers shouldn't have any rights or protections. That sounds like a pretty extreme viewpoint. Or just one coming from an employer's perspective where I can see why you might desire no limits on treatments of workers.
It is quite common in highly capitalist societies, workers should be thankful they get a couple of pennies if at all.
They should learn to be hard workers, saving all the penies they can, never be sick, and some day if they don't die before it, living the dream of being their own boss.
Nobody has a right to a business to exist or any particular job exist and yet nonetheless there are the rules of the game that people must abide by to make society works.
Are you inherently saying that the Japanese anime industry is not following regulations? Because they are, and they have been surviving this way for decades and have no problem finding people who want to work there.
You skipped over the first clause of the sentence: "If you can't pay a living wage"
japanese animators are not living in the streets, homeless and starving so I am not sure what this "if" is about
I bet they aren't living great either, when compared with western consumers with bookshelfs full of anime.
You just moved the goalposts.
Not at all, they deserve the same quality life of their bosses, getting rich from western money while exploring passionate slaves, in modern feudalism.
That can't happen by definition unless you get rid of inequality altogether, or engage in shenanigans like defining them as "contractors".
The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy! And whether you personally find a business model morally "valid" is not a good reason to make economic changes. People deserve a cost-benefit analysis before their livelihood is taken away. The economic consequences of increasing the minimum wage will be just the same as previous attempts. More automation, less customer service, more unemployment among low-skilled workers.
Where the line that separates goodwill custody of the commons like roads, public education, enforcing contracts and laws and "interference"?
That's a good question but presently it's fair to say that governments are way past that line. It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit. At least this would stop the hidden tax of inflation.
Every time politicians decide to do good somewhere they do bad everywhere. It's not that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent (although many are) is just that free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.
I'm fascinated - does this hold under all conditions? Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states
Maybe not.
I don't think we should base our choice of economical system in the eventuality of an all-out war. Regardless of what I think in the event of an all-out war government will try to appropriate the resources it wants and gear the economy towards its needs because it can. A free market always efficiently allocate resources however I imagine the goals of the economical agents would be closer to preventing the destruction of wealth and human life than winning a war at all costs but this is context dependent.
Ukraine is an example where people from all over the world on their own volition contributed to the war effort in ways beyond what state violence could achieve. And Russia is the opposite example, top-down and dysfunctional.
People should have the freedom to use whatever they want as exchange medium. I don't know what is best but the current system with unsustainable growing debt do more harm than occasional adversarial nation-states could.
I mean, "minimum wage" is the federal definition of "fair pay". So in that lens it isn't fair.
When possible. The issue is a lot of anime in Japan still relies in broadcast, so it's much harder to increase the cost of entry. Streaming is becoming more popular, but nowhere near as prevalent as the western streaming services.
And physical media... Well, feel free to look up your favorite anime's pricing in Japan. Not only the prices but the fact that they tend to bundle seasonal anime in batches of 2-3 episodes, not an entire seasonal box.
The Federal Minimum Wage was last updated in 2009. Since then, costs for food have gone significantly up and costs for rent have skyrocketed.
Sure, the US federal minimum wage. That's definitely an issue but one mitigated by states raising their own minimum wage.
But the topic here is on Japan. They did increase their minimum wage last year, after the pandemic caused inflation in the Japanese economy for the first time in 30 years. Their economic situation is extremely different from the US which exploded (then receded, then kept rising) in those decades.
And yet the compensation and quality of life are very poor in this industry, as described in this article.
This is very much not true for worker salaries. For one thing, workers can not easily hop from area of expertise to area of expertise like capital can — and workers oftentimes lack the ability to take the high risk that might comes with quitting a job in search of another or attempting to switch career paths.
The natural state is for owners to drive down worker compensation until it's essentially slave labor. In a "competitive" world for owners, competing means driving down costs which means an across-the-board destruction of worker benefits.
We have some protections in this country (thank you, unions!) and full-stop rules against slavery that prevent us from actually seeing this, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen.
And trust me: People in financial power would absolutely grind workers down to a penny an hour and still claim it's "fair pay" if they could. They'd say "well, if it wasn't fair pay people wouldn't do it" while making sure the entirety of society was arranged to prevent people from leaving their jobs.
Uh, last I checked, capital is not capable of hopping from area of expertise to area of expertise. A GPU cannot decide to become a burger flipping robot (much to the dismay of some crypto investors).
I thought capital in this context meant investment money. Not finished products.
A investor can quickly move capital from one industry to another, but the worker cannot.
He must sell his participation which in this context would be done probably at significant loss.
That is one hell of a hand wave.
To say nothing of the lack of other regulations making it to where even with proper payment transparency one has no clue if an employer has a corporate culture that in many states would constitute an abusive pattern in a domestic partnership yet most of those same states have at best some limited carve-outs to do anything about it.
The entertainment industry in particular seems to be really good at exploiting folks, but in IT there is still a sort of elephant in the room; So many of us who read and post want to be the sorts of folks with vested-FAANG security cushions, however we know through self or colleagues plenty of cases where many shops will have a huge uphill battle to make a huge impacting change and the result is a nice review; in the extreme cases the reward/value is in multiple orders of magnitude.
And maybe that would be OK if it wasn't for the other pressures; which is probably something animators deal with too based on general tone and the times the industry tries to cleverly sneak jokes in about the situation.
One could reasonably define fair in terms of a nations minimum wage while discarding any nonsensical carve outs designed to appease particular industries, you could define it in turns of what it costs to live a reasonable life in the nation in question, and you could define it in turns of ratio of gross profit to income of average employee.
There are so many ways to define fair we could write essays on which method was most accurate and useful.
Free markets only exist in economics textbooks. Real markets unconstrained are always hopelessly broken. Bereft of rules most of the work would end up owned by a tiny number of companies who would agree what wages should be and agree not to hire each others workers. They would make access to all the most desirable work they control contingent on rules designed to strangle up and coming competitors in the cradle and gradually increase price to the absolute most the market would bear. Impoverishing the people who actually do the work would poison the pool of workers gradually destroying quality of content while companies increased prices to make up for lost profit and blamed piracy.
Capitalism is a toddler left on a rug with a cocked gun. The kid always finds the gun.
While I agree with your argument, it's not as simple as "letting the low value efforts die". If most anime were to stop being produced, most of the animators would also be fired and be unable to continue what is (I assume) their passion and career. The simple fact is that there isn't enough money going into the industry to pay all the animators a fair wage, so either animators get paid less or there are fewer animators.
Vocational awe is a curse. If you have an endless supply of people willing to work pennies then the industry will build itself around paying them pennies. This does not mean that this is the only way you can build an animation industry - just that this is the path Toei and Sunrise took.
The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members of the production committee (often toy companies like Good Smile[0]) decided to deliberately take less money because they didn't want their control diluted. They're only able to do this because they can fleece animators into working longer for less money rather than having to get more capital in the project.
As for animators having to find new work... good? The current situation is one in which animators pursue their passions, and then have their passions completely take over their life and crush their soul. If they quit en masse, that would be backpressure against productions that want animators to fall on their swords, and production committees that want shit done cheaply.
[0] Who, incidentally, funded Hiroyuki Nishimura's[1] buyout of 4chan in exchange for all those J-List ads the site had.
[1] Former operator of 2channel who got pushed out in an incredibly sketchy way by his website host.
Isn’t this a paternalistic point of view? Why do you know better than the animators who are accepting these jobs? Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?
The animators themselves are saying they hate their working conditions and their dream job has become a nightmare.
Why don't they quit?
We have regulations like minimum wages and other labor regulation rules to prevent abuse.
Unless you want to say that getting paid a minimum wage paternalistic?
I'd argue yes it is paternalistic, actually
I mean, in this scenario they wouldn't get a job, or it'd be an evergreen job that they shouldn't expect to get early in their careers. They wouldn't just laze around if they can't get paid as an animator (especially not in Japanese culture).
At best they'd try to be their own entrepreneur and make money that way, while gathering experience for these now-evergreen studios. At worst they give up or try another career. Paternalistic or not, almost every first world country has labor laws precisely so a job can't pay pennies to sustain its business. And governments do that because they don't want income hoarded by the managers and stifling the middle/low class economy.
I always like when small business complain that "payroll is the majority of our expenses", but when you look at the expenses it is something like:
"How can I keep my business afloat? We've already cut the staff down to the bare minimum and we're barely getting by!"$290/month? If those cashiers are working 100 hours a month they're making about a third of (US federal) minimum wage.
There’s data comparing EU prices for equal fast food like MacDonalds and the pay for workers and the cost of the final product appears to bear little relationship to worker pay, i.e. corporations crying poor at the usa minimum wage are full of it. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-workers-denmark/
They're working 39.5 hours a week to make sure they aren't in danger of getting benefits.
That isn't remotely the type of breakdown of any business I've never seen. Not even close.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but you'd be better off using real numbers to do it. I've never come across a business owner taking 45% of total income. Competition ensures those kinds of profit levels generally don't exist.
That is how (modern) society works already on a global scale. I am not saying it's good, but it's the way things are.
The worlds economy isn’t underpinned by an underpaid underclass.
Every major commodity cobalt, shoes, cellphones etc has large scale automated production. What’s going on is essentially a parallel system where people making almost nothing can barely out complete automation. However, because both are occurring at the same time consumers wouldn’t notice a significant change if 100% of that production was automated.
Granted without infrastructure and a skilled workforce you can’t instantly swap to automation, but that’s a different question.
the automate-able industries have done it, leaving behind the ones that aren't as automatable. This is why there's still many developing countries that export cheap labour. You can think of those as the "underpaid" class.
Not necessarily bad, since i believe they are not being forced under lock and chain in slavery. They are merely economically incentivized.
I don’t think there are low value non automate-able industries right now. Try and name some.
That’s not to say nobody is making subsistence wages making shoes, just that there’s robots making shoes in another factory. It may not be 1:1 in every niche as a train isn’t a drop in replacement for a long haul trucker, but they are still in competition.
No, if anything, the above comment is saying the opposite by advocating the bitter but moral vision of a smaller economy with fewer seats, and in this case less anime. We can say that the anime might be better, and that maybe the anime which dies is shitty anyway so good riddance, but we can also say that we're envisioning a smaller economy with fewer artists and less art.
Similarly, maybe we should have fewer musicians and less music, but at least we have an absence of the slave economy you mention. Maybe the medical profession is doing something right by limiting the flow of the pipeline.
There's a big difference between unpopular and low-value. And it takes time to get really good at something, it can be helpful to be able to work for less, if your skills aren't yet good enough to command a high value.
People do like their work and would rather be paid less than to see the industry fold.
A similar argument was used in favor of perpetuating slavery prior to the civil war.
I've accepted that. Now let's pay people fairly for their time and skill.
The online independent animator community is thriving. If people create something that has appeal, they are able to at least partially subsist from subscriptions and donations. I contribute to several animators' Patreon accounts (though Patreon takes far too much out of it). If there isn't enough appeal, well... I'm sorry. Either everyone agrees to a fair wage based on these market conditions, independent efforts raise money through crowdsourcing, or... people find other ways to sustain themselves. That's just a healthy economy in action.
How is telling people to live off donations not just an end run around your wage rules? They don't apply if you're self employed?
My wage rules? You think fairly compensated labor is just some idea I came up with?
Most of the people whom I contribute to are able to work full-time on their passions through donations and make more than they would if they were traditionally employed.
There is no such thing as a fair wage, fair is subjective and this can be debated for hours by academics.
What we have (in some countries) is: 1) Minimum wage: defined as the least amount legal to pay someone. 2) Living wage: loosely defined as the wage needed for minimum living standards for a given region 3) Market wage: What the market determines your value is worth based on supply/demand.
None of these are "fair" and they aren't usualy the same but sometimes can be.
Bollocks. A fair wage is a wage which is agreed upon by employee and employer, and is livable according to local cost of living. Let's not get into a semantic argument.
That's your definition of a "fair wage". The parent's point is that it's subjective and others might disagree. For instance I've seen people take the marxist position that software engineers earning 6 figures isn't "fair" because the company is making even more money from their labor and that amount is effectively being stolen from them.
It's not just my definition of fair wage, it's the insight that "fair" can only be determined by the parties involved in the transaction, providing they have adequate information such as minimum and market wages for their craft, the value created by their effort, etc.
This is the key insight that OP is missing which makes them incorrectly think that "fair" can never be determined because it is some kind of objective goal post. It's not, it's highly subjective and local.
I suspect the end result here will actually be fairly comparable to post-slavery agriculture, in that technology will eliminate a lot of these jobs. Tough to imagine that GenAI doesn't have an enormous impact on anime over the next few years.
It depends a lot on the culture there.
1) there are actual labor laws in Japan, so they can't just cut off 90% of their workforce at the snap of the finger
2) there is a much stronger culture of conformity in Japan. So it is much easier to shame a company when getting negative PR in Japan and those complaints can overcome raw profits.
Also, tech wise AI is at least 5 years out from anything animated. What I've seen in motion so far is extremely crude.
I... think you are overestimating that by a lot. We went from nothing to AlphaGo to ChatGPT to Midjourney et al within a few years, with the timespan between each shortening.
Yeah, the stuff Runway has been coming out with absolutely blows my mind. Can't wait to see what it looks like by the end of this year, let alone five.
Slavery ended as industrialized agriculture was taking off. While farmers are paid better now, there are a lot fewer of them.
Perhaps we will see the same with animation; there will be a few well-paid and highly-skilled artists that are automating with a bunch of AI. I doubt that will be the solution to equality though.
US and other first world countries such as S.Korea still have slave labor agriculture, it's a fact and it's still economical
It does not seem outside the bounds of reason that all the ‘in-between’ stuff gets done with AI. At that point you only still need your keyframes.
Doesn’t really make things much cheaper because the people drawing those in-between frames are already paid peanuts :/
No no and no.
Companies will find a way to make things work even if labour costs more. Every company and neo liberal says that same thing about regulation, employee wages, tax increases .... Funnily enough when those same regulations/wage increases/taxes come in they do not leave the market ... Strange.
Edit: clarity
Companies can and will adapt.
The way is to move / outsource to where it costs less. There is a reason that iPhones are mostly made in China.
If they were made in the US and cost $2000 instead of $1000 people would still buy them.
They do leave the market. Where did you get that idea from? My parents have extreme difficulty travelling now because they have a dog, but their local dog kennels have been closing down. When the last one went my mother talked to the owner. He said the rise in minimum wage was killing the business. People were willing to work there for lower than the new minimum because they love dogs basically, but customers weren't able to pay the new higher prices. So he had to fold and was quite bitter about it because the government had basically killed his business that he'd spent years building, in the name of "fairness". So all the workers lost their jobs and of course there's a knock on effect on the wider economy because that particular service made it easier to do leisure spending.
But socialists never think about this stuff. They just pretend there are no downsides to central control of prices.
Agree with your post but sort of offtopic:
We have the same problem, "dog hotels" are too expensive. We just pay someone to come to our house a few times a day. A kid we know in the neighborhood, don't tell the government but they charge less than minimum wage! shock
This is, basically, what happened to movies. Because of that, you'll see very few risks, and the people who get to be creative tend to be the ones who have an established track record. People have been complaining that the theater is full of sequels and superhero movies for decades.
Yeah, but the thing is people go to see superhero movies and sequels and remakes. And have been for a long time.
When people stop going to superhero movies, they'll stop getting made. Except for Spider-Man; Sony is going to keep rebooting that and doing another series of three movies until they are bought by Disney; if they lose that license by not making a film in time, they'll never get it back.
The fact is that most people aren't enthusiasts for every thing they participate in. And things like big super hero movies aren't targeting the cinemaphiles to begin with.
It's always unfortunate hearing commentors thinking "people are tired of Marvel" when seeing low sales for The Marvel's, when the reality is much more boring external factors like Disney+ cannabalizing sales and cinemas still not truly recovering from the pandemic.
Planet Money did an episode about this, The Spiderman Problem: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/28/1076531156/the-spider-man-pro...
Short story is that Marvel licensed Spiderman for cheap with a clause that Sony could keep the license so long as they produced a movie every N years.
So give the artists their current meager salaries and bolster it with a percentage of profits?
Seems really easy to fairly compensate the artists.
they want just the upside, not the downside as well.
People are paid fairly, they accept the wages they’re being paid. In the alternative world you describe, many/most wouldn’t have a job (at least not doing what they enjoy).
Ha. There’s already a large cohort of people that are not being paid fairly and/or working a job they don’t enjoy and/or don’t have a job.
Unionization sounds like the answer here.
What does Japanese culture think about unionization?
Any left-leaning politics is not going to sell in Japan.
It's a supply/demand problem. There's an endless number of of people who want to be animators, but relatively few positions. So the pay is crap.
This further reduces the budget of productions so that all kinds of junk can be produced at rock bottom prices and still have a chance at making money.
And let's be honest, the vast vast majority of anime is utter crap.
If things were different however, anime might end up as a more hit-driven industry the way Hollywood productions (or heck even startups) are.
That's a great point. Niche anime is likely subsidized by merchandise and people addicted to gacha and pachinko gambling that use their most popular IPs.
They would be untenable at current profit margins. Significant profits could still be made while also paying a living wage if current profit margin expectations were reduced and viewed across a property as a whole (i.e. merch sales, ongoing streaming rights, etc.), but production committees are in a position of power and choose not to.
Japan has a fascinating culture. Wouldn't you say the same thing about video games? Which studio can sustain 6-7 years of active game development (The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild) exclusive for one console?