Bento Box Entertainment Editorial Workers Unionize With Motion Picture Editors Guild
Editorial employees at the animation studio Bento Box Entertainment have unionized with the Motion Picture Editors Guild after management agreed to voluntarily recognize the group through a card check.
A third-party arbitrator confirmed that a majority of the 15-member bargaining unit signed authorization cards, paving the way towards voluntary recognition, the MPEG (IATSE Local 700) said on Friday. The bargaining unit includes employees who work in pre- and post-production at the company, responsible for series including Paradise PD and HouseBroken, as well as the upcoming show Krapopolis. In their roles, the covered workers edit voice actors’ recordings, build animatics (essentially, animated storyboards) based off of artwork created in pre-production and edit other audio and picture in postproduction on Bento Box’s animated projects.
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The Hollywood Reporter has asked Bento Box for comment. A card check, which essentially tests if a union has majority support among the group of workers it wants to cover and allows both the union and the employer to avoid a formal National Labor Relations Board election, is a method that management and labor typically use to reach a voluntary recognition agreement.
“We’re proud of the Bento Box crew for taking action to unionize their workplace, and we’re excited to welcome them to the Guild family,” MPEG president Alan Heim said in a statement. “As our union kin in the Animation Guild fighting for a #NewDeal4Animation have been making clear, animated content plays an enormous role in fueling our industry. But too often, the editorial craftspeople helping to bring this content to the screen don’t enjoy the same union protections that their counterparts in live-action do. Kudos to the crew of Bento Box for standing up to assert that they deserve a union, too.”
The MPEG already covers some editorial workers on projects at Bento Box Entertainment, including the Fox animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers, because those projects are made in collaboration with studios that are signatory to the union’s contracts. And other workers at Bento Box are also already unionized, including a group that is allied with The Animation Guild (IATSE Local 839).
The Bento Box editorial group is the latest to unionize during a time that has seen a flurry of animation organizing activity: Earlier this year, production workers on the Hulu animated sitcom Solar Opposites unionized via an NLRB election, while card counts resulted in the voluntary recognition of unions of production workers at the L.A. outpost of the animation studio Titmouse and at the Adult Swim animated comedy Rick and Morty. The Animation Guild also expanded for the first time beyond the Los Angeles area by unionizing over 100 workers at the New York location of Titmouse at the start of the year.
