Ripple effects continue to be felt from the ongoing lawsuit against the Walt Disney Company, and several other major animation and visual effect studios, for an alleged conspiracy to suppress employee wages and drive down hiring competition in the digital animation and vfx industries.
On September 29, 2015, Disney stockholder Eugene F. Towers filed a lawsuit against key Disney executives, including Walt Disney Studios president Alan Bergman, Walt Disney Animation Studios president Ed Catmull, and Disney COO Thomas Staggs, as well as individual members of the company’s board of directors (pictured above), including chairman and CEO Robert Iger, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former Starbucks CEO Orin Smith. The lawsuit had been under seal due to the inclusion of confidential information obtained by Towers, and portions of the complaint (which can be read here) remain redacted.
The lawsuit recounts the claims and evidence in the earlier lawsuit — from the alleged conspiracy’s beginnings in the mid-1980s, when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs, and Lucas and Catmull agreed thereafter not to compete for the skilled labor of artists and technicians — to the broadening of the conspiracy, to include Disney, DreamWorks, ImageMovers, Blue Sky, and Sony, as well as Department of Justice investigations into the hiring practices of the studios and tech companies, including Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe Systems.