Nickelodeon Animation Studios has agreed to voluntarily recognize The Animation Guild as the bargaining representative for production workers at the studio.
In December of last year, a supermajority of production workers at Nickelodeon Studios voted in favor of unionizing with The Animation Guild (TAG), IATSE Local 839, and started working on their first collective bargaining agreement. The production workers joined more than 400 Nickelodeon artists who were already represented by TAG at that time.
After the vote, Nickelodeon was presented with the request for voluntary recognition. The company’s lawyers instead chose to strategically exclude a group of those workers based on job title, capitalizing on “common misconceptions of labor law in order to unnecessarily prolong the process.”