Emails, court docs show how Sony stood up to Steve Jobs’ and Pixar’s wage-fixing

I think the referenced bit on PandoDaily [1] has a bit more meat and seeing exactly what was said really drives home the point.<p>From Ed Catmull&#x27;s email to Steve Jobs:<p><i>&quot;...one of our department managers told me that she was offered a position as producer for Sony’s first CG film and is likely to accept.</i><p><i>&quot;The director of the movie is REDACTED [Jill Culton, ex-Lucasfilm and on Pixar-produced Monsters Inc—M.A.] who started off as head of story on Monsters but burnt out. She is good but fragile.&quot;</i><p><i>REDACTED will talk with her [the Pixar manager that Sony was poaching]. She isn’t so great that we have to keep her, and she isn’t so bad that she would hurt Sony.</i><p>Where wage-fixing is very general and hard to quantify this is quite personal and tangible. He&#x27;s directly looking to derail someone&#x27;s career by preventing them from seizing an opportunity he&#x27;s not willing to give them. At the same time he craps on someone who even he can&#x27;t deny was a founding part of what was at that point their biggest hit.<p>It&#x27;s a grown man treating people and careers the way a toddler does toys.<p>1: <a href="http://pando.com/2014/07/10/revealed-emails-court-docs-show-how-sony-stood-up-to-steve-jobs-and-pixars-wage-fixing-cartel/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;10&#x2F;revealed-emails-court-docs-show-...</a>

This is so disappointing. I&#x27;ve always really respected Catmull. He has given many presentations and speeches with incredible value.<p>His actions here are, I think, by definition evil. Decisions made with selfish intent with willful disregard to the negative consequences it has on others. That&#x27;s my definition at least, everyone has their own. How utterly disappointing. :(

Totally not surprised:<p>Back from ~2001-2004 when I was working on designing the Lucas Arts Letterman Digital Arts center in the Presidio, there was a certain CIO who wanted us to plan to build a studio in Asia. The reason was that &quot;Asain animators are very cheap, and they aren&#x27;t primadonna&#x27;s like the overpaid ones here in the states.&quot;<p>They saw animators as commodity COGs.

This is really sad, I greatly respect Ed Catmull for his work in graphics (z-buffer, catmull rom spline) and as a leader of extraordinarily consistently creative company.<p>It just goes to show that even the best of us can succumb to greed.

Let the payback begin, including interest.<p>Many years ago (10?) I distinctively remember reading an article about the collapse of salary of animators. Their salary had shot up as much as a million a year thanks to surprise hits such as the first batch of hits from Pixar. But in a matter of a few months or a year or so, the salary had gone down drastically.<p>The article was mentioning glut of animated movies etc, but I&#x27;m suspecting it was due to this illegal act.

Fucking Catmull too? At this stage I&#x27;m no longer angry about the wage fixing scandal. I&#x27;ve moved into complete disappointment.<p>Ed was someone I really looked up to.

I often wondered why the salaries were relatively low for such a group of people. Now I know.

Makes you wonder how bad wage-fixing is in the Valley don&#x27;t it?

Does anyone know if animator wages (or programmer wages for that matter) have shot up substantially since the whole no-recruitment scandal came up?<p>That&#x27;d give us some idea of how much wages were suppressed all those years...

It&#x27;s depressing that I&#x27;m far less surprised people are this evil than I am that high level execs are this fucking stupid about using logged, discoverable email to engage in criminal activity.<p>There&#x27;s no way being unethical (or at the very least, &quot;an utter dick&quot;) in one area doesn&#x27;t bleed over into other areas.

Will anything come out of these investigations, other than fines? Fines are useless. How are the going to prevent such things in future?

Url changed from <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerges-as-central-figure-in-the-wage-fixing-scandal-101362.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cartoonbrew.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;pixars-ed-catmull-emerge...</a>, which points to this.

The link goes to a specific comment, should strip that if possible.

He should have artificially controlled wages through legal means: start a union.