Walt Disney Animation Studios production workers may be the next group to join one of the industry’s biggest unions.

Seventy-eight Disney employees are working with The Animation Guild (TAG)/International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) 839 in a unionization effort to negotiate their first collective agreement. According to TAG, the group represents a “super-majority” of production workers at the studio that includes production managers, supervisors and coordinators.

Their demands are summed up as an “end to unsustainable workplace practices, such as low wages and unpaid overtime.”

But the group’s chief complaint centers around being excluded from an existing agreement Disney has with TAG that encompasses more than 550 feature film artists (including CG artists, character designers and animation supervisors). This exclusion, and Disney’s “refusal” to recognize the group as a collective bargaining unit, “runs contrary to the studio’s past practice of recognizing workers who perform comparable duties across multiple existing collective bargaining agreements,” TAG said in a release.

Disney did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

IATSE has filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board to certify the union, and the group has launched an online petition calling for Disney to formally recognize it. At press time, this petition had more than 5,500 signatures.

The union has launched similar drives with other companies in the past year, including Nickelodeon Studios’ production workers, who voted to unionize with TAG in December. The job titles of the workers in this group were not covered under Nickelodeon’s existing collective agreement with writers, artists and CG techs. In January, Nickelodeon agreed to voluntarily recognize TAG as the bargaining rep for these workers.

UPDATE March 9, 2023: Disney says it respects its employees rights to unionize, and the company’s plan is to let the NLRB process play out. If employees vote to unionize, it will negotiate an agreement with them in good faith.

Photo of Walt Disney Animation Studios courtesy of Coolcaesar via Wikimedia Commons