Stress Aesthetics and Deprivation Payroll Systems

Abstract

The working conditions and production cultures of Hollywood are tightly and interactively woven together with film and television working conditions in many other parts of the world. In Production Culture, I argued that the de facto mission of Hollywood production’s “race to the bottom” in the new millennium and the age of user-generated content has been “to acquire content for little or nothing and to get everyone to work for free.”1 Consider how this mantra resonates with the following recent disclosure by an Indian worker, who describes current working conditions for VFX “artists” in South Asia: There is a disturbing trend in India for the past couple years … where VFX artists are forced to work for “experience” or “goodwill” … in “apprentice” or “training” positions. These apprenticeships usually last for a period ranging between 3–9 months and are generally unpaid. Some companies at the end of the term of these apprenticeships cut loose the interns stating reasons of “insufficient quality” or the more popular “We just don’t have any projects going on right now… We’ll call you.” OR They might consider extending your training to an extra three months or more, if you choose to remain unpaid for the duration … You will have to repeat the whole process when you join another studio, because experience certificates and references are non-existent here (unless the studio exec is your close personal friend/relation). It appears that cheap labor isn’t good enough, now the labor is required to be free … The end result being that the companies, get an almost inexhaustible pool of FREE Labor, allowing them to turn essentially a profit without Cost of production overhead in terms of labor.