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INTEREST: Animator in Japan Reveals Their 1st Year Earnings In the Industry

zrnzle500 wrote:

I made more than that working at McDonald’s in high school/college, and I barely made much more than the minimum wage (the federal one, that is). That’s pretty damning.

That's the gamble with freelance work. You don't get a salary wage like a McDonalds employee would, and that means minimum wage isn't applicable either. So if you don't get that much work you can make even less than a minimum wage job.

At this point they’d be better off going back to a medieval apprentice system including room and board.

Ultimately it's like trying to raise the minimum wage in the us, most of the jobs paying that are e what the market dictates . And are typically low to no skill jobs that are often meant to be short jobs not careers. At the end of the day all raising the wage will do in Japan or any where else is put most of these animators out of job on exchange for the handful that remain getting a higher wage.

I'm not saying its right but reality and morality are often conflicting and ambiguous.

At this point they’d be better off going back to a medieval apprentice system including room and board.

And yet in other countries, similar jobs pay much more livable wages, and the prices of products aren't higher by the same amount, e.g. a Big Mac doesn't cost twice as much in Denmark or Australia.

And so at the Aalborg McDonald’s, for instance, a Big Mac extra value meal costs 58 kroner, or $10.25, while the Dollar Menu is the 10 kroner menu, which means it’s the dollar-seventy-seven menu here. In Denmark, taxes are included in list prices, unlike in the US, so backing out the 25 percent VAT gives us $8.20 for a Big Mac meal and $1.41 for the “dollar” menu. That compares to $6 and $1 in Seattle.

(Which doesn't even pass the sniff test anyway: somehow, all that virtually-worthless labor manages to produce enough revenue to fund lavish executive salaries, dynastic wealth for family ownership, dividends, stock buybacks, etc.)

And it's interesting to note that only a few years ago McDonald's had far more employees than the current 200,000 figure. It turns out that as minimum wages have gone up the number of jobs has gone down....
Now don't get me wrong, I think the pay level of animators is sickeningly low but I don't think the solution is as simple as blaming the problem on overpaid management or a lack of collective bargaining power. As others have posted earlier in the thread there is only so much money available to fund new productions. If animators like Ryoko are paid a much more reasonable wage than the paltry sum mentioned in the article it is clear that the cost of producing anime will go up substantially...I'm pointing out that jobs will be lost. If the producers have to spend twice as much per episode then half of the animators will be out of work.

I don't think this is really a sound way to reason about the impact of a wage increase. You're making ceteris paribus assumptions all over the place here, with little justification (when inferring that MW increases drove McDonald's job decreases), and claiming there'd be a 1-for-1 loss of jobs for increased labor costs, but in practice there's no reason to expect a linear relationship like this.

In the case of minimum wages, specifically, it is in fact quite common to find that modest increases in the minimum wage do not reduce employment at all.

A sufficiently large increase in wages would of course necessarily produce some combination of reduced employment and increased prices for end users (us/viewers), but it is rather hard to get a good handle on what "sufficiently large" means in context, and to just ballpark how large the effects would be.

It's always easy for people to say to pay animators or any kind of workers more wages, but it's never that simple. Not every job can realistically be livable, whether people want to admit it or not. If you want to live off going door to door mowing lawns, you better be mowing a lot of lawns to make that lifestyle work, or cutting out a lot of expenses in your life.

Great idea. No more anime because these idiot animators need to learn that they’re no better than lawnmowers (guess we’ll also ignore the fact landscaping/gardening is an industry). They really should wake up to the fact that their job ain’t worth doing and go pursue a livable career rather than these silly cartoons that clearly aren’t sustainable.

I totally agree there's no reason to expect a linear relationship. This is my fault for writing that "half" the jobs would be lost. I didn't mean that literally, I meant that a substantial number would be lost...
Right, but we are not talking about "modest" increase in wages here. The numbers Ryoko posted are far from what anyone might consider a reasonable wage, especially for a skilled job like animation. The article mentions that the average yearly pay for a person in the anime industry was 1,550,000 yen and yet the national average for the same age group was a full million yen higher. That's basically a 60% increase which I would not call modest.