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The Battle for Union Anime Dubs

Unfortunately, the pessimistic part of me still thinks hell will freeze over before a non-union studio based in Texas goes union, although things are definitely capable of change (the Netflix SAG-AFTRA agreement is a pretty recent thing after all). And while voice acting rates in Funi projects have risen recently to meet the recommended standard for non-union work (although I believe said recommended standard has risen again since this tweet since it was a year prior: https://twitter.com/marinmmillerVO/status/1463221932329820161), I know that improvement is not the case for every actor given the tiered rate system (aka actors who don't know or feel like they can advocate for higher pay/don't have an agent that gets them that automatic boost).

But my own feelings on the future aside, I couldn't help but feel apprehensive for a while about fans jumping aboard and discussing the whole union vs non-union issue like this for a while due to the one-sided nature of which actors were predominately talking about it & how easy it can be to spread misinformation about SAG-AFTRA. The former because it felt like only LA actors, either mostly working on SAG projects already + are at least fi-core if not already in the union, were the only people driving the conversation (admittedly for good reason). The latter is self-explanatory even in the article: issues like how of a huge percentage of Texas' acting gigs in general are non-union so what would that mean for local talent if Funiroll did go union (TX being a right-to-work state really only means you can't be forced to join even when working on union projects), misinformation on Taft-Hartley paperwork (how much is involved + whether companies would bother with it to that kind of level), high costs of membership & dues being different in different states, what all this means for international actors who only just started getting a foot in the door with remote recording, etc....

While everyone and their mother agrees the rates in general for dubbing need to improve, when you see the actual acting pool disagreeing online about unionization, even if a lot of it is primarily due to misinformation about said union, my instinct is usually to wait until there's something more organized and concrete to point others to (see the video game VA strike a few years back). I'm more hopeful than ever though that we are heading in that direction.

All in all, it's nice to see ANN publishing an article like this for something so important! SAG-AFTRA as a whole is being pulled so thin right now dealing with COVID fallout + organizations like CODA are made up of volunteers and can't be there to answer every single question or concern 24/7. It's beneficial for companies to have actors be misinformed about unionization and not talk about it, just as its better for them to have the general public not care about it at all. So anything like this that makes those two things harder is always a good thing.

Article:

Quote:

Then there's the elephant in the room: FUNimation's dubs were produced largely in Texas, a “right-to-work” state, and will likely remain there under Crunchyroll management. Right-to-work laws, which exist in 27 mostly Republican-controlled U.S. states, allow workers to take a job at a company with a union contract without having to join the union or pay dues. This significantly reduces SAG's influence over studios by removing a source of funding and their biggest bargaining chip: access to top talent. That means far fewer union productions than states without right-to-work laws, like California and New York. And the union penalizes members for working non-union shows, driving some actors who work primarily with Texas-based companies — anime voice actors, for instance — to forego union membership entirely.

Republican here. How might right to work laws have been different if that say "27 mostly-Democrat-controlled U.S. states"?

I feel like a reason why allot of the dubbing moved over from Canada to the states was because it was so much cheaper. It would be great if this opened more opportunities for Canadian dubbing if the market is more even.

Opportunity for more dubs from Ocean and Blue Water??

PLEASE

From some interviews I've seen, the lack of Union dubs being done in California, was what killed the dub scene there in the late 00s. Bandai, and I think Geneon, did mostly union dubs. So when they went, the common VAs of the day lost work and moved over to video games and American animation.

I wonder if Crunchyroll will still have some of their dubs recorded in LA, or only use Funimation from now on. I guess given that Funimation no longer have a streaming service, it might be that everything CR gets, they dub.

It’s interesting when you think about how all of Sony’s first party games for PlayStation pretty much all of them do use union actors but can’t stretch that out into dubbing for anime with Crunchyroll

Blue Water's the only non-union studio out there in Canada.