21 The Federation Versus the Guild
Of all the many crafts in Hollywood, animation was the last to unionize. As Herb Sorrell testified later, “The cartoonists throughout the industry were very much underpaid.”1 Perhaps it was because animation was a newer enterprise, or the themes were commonly filled with risibility and fantasy. Or because, as Robert D. Feild wrote in July 1941, Disney’s animation “is to most people still a mystery while the artist himself is an enigma invariably associated with a Mouse.”2 Whatever the reason, labor organizations noticed this. (By September 1940 even the CIO had approached animation artists at Disney and MGM.)
The Screen Cartoon Guild—newly renamed the Screen Cartoonists Guild—needed an advantage. Bill Littlejohn, a high-ranking MGM animator, was president of the Guild. An MGM assistant animator, Cuban-born Pepe Ruiz, was its financial secretary. They approached the Painters Union, which was part of the AFL and of which Herb Sorrell was the famed business agent. The Guild arranged to become an affiliate of the Painters Union, which provided two invaluable resources: the support of the AFL, with its thousands of members across the country, and Sorrell himself.
Sorrell went to work. Given that Littlejohn and Ruiz worked there, Sorrell approached MGM animation first. They signed up the MGM animation artists with the Guild, collecting union cards with signatures.
Sorrell took the stack of signed union cards to MGM producer Fred Quimby, argued for the Guild’s representation, and challenged MGM’s proposed pay scale. He was met with what he called “the usual opposition.”3 On Wednesday night, September 18, the MGM cartoonists voted to strike in one week if they didn’t get representation. The threat made front-page headlines.4
Screen Cartoonists Guild leader and MGM animator Bill Littlejohn. Image captured by striker Ray Patin.
MGM was not the only animation studio under Sorrell’s scope. As MGM animators were voting to strike, Sorrell reached out to one Disney artist who, he had heard, was the mouthpiece for forty other artists: Dave Hilberman.
Hilberman was distraught about the sudden mass layoffs. He invited a dozen coworkers to his home and pitched them the benefits of an independent, industry-wide union. They, too, had grievances that could only be addressed through collective bargaining. The most important was job security.
First, Hilberman needed proof that the majority of Disney employees wanted the Guild to represent them. He needed membership cards.5 Acquiring signatures would take time. Hilberman printed blank cards and distributed them throughout the Disney studio. The ones that came back with signatures he forwarded to Sorrell and Littlejohn.
The Guild triumphed on September 21 when MGM signed a union contract. The agreement stipulated a 100 percent closed shop as well as a forty-hour workweek, paid overtime, and a $4 increase in starting salaries. Animators and layout artists would start at $85 a week, assistant animators at $30 a week, inbetweeners and inkers at $22 a week, and painters $20 a week. The new MGM wages were all greater than those at Disney. The Guild’s victory was also front-page news.6 Suddenly, Guild membership cards at Disney started coming back to Hilberman with signatures.7
The country was becoming more pro-labor every day. On October 24, 1940, a federally mandated forty-hour workweek went into effect. Nicknamed the Wages and Hours Act, this law guaranteed overtime pay for any nonspecialists. The following Monday, October 28, Walt Disney Productions released a memo stating that overtime would soon be paid for hours over forty per week for employees who weren’t considered specialists. This would curtail the Saturday half-day. The memo somberly concluded that the act “will add a further burden of overtime payments to the losses already suffered through the curtailment of foreign revenues.”8
The artists, however, were thrilled. “For the first time in five-and-a-half years I would receive overtime! I was elated,” remembered one of Walt’s loyal artists. “But any pleasure I got from the new law was spoiled by the usual rumor of Christmas layoffs.”9
By November the studio had assigned the last of the lead animators for Dumbo.10 Bill Tytla would animate the title character, inspired by his own two-year-old son, Peter.
Ward Kimball, a fan of southern music, was assigned the crows. Fred Moore was given the boyish and appealing Timothy Q. Mouse. Babbitt was assigned the singing delivery boy, Mr. Stork. To animate him, Babbitt caricatured voice actor Sterling Holloway’s overgrown hair and half-lidded eyes.11
The rest of the studio was working on cartoon shorts and a slew of features: Bambi, The Reluctant Dragon, the Jack and the Beanstalk–inspired “Mickey Feature,” The Wind in the Willows, and a follow-up to Fantasia.
Babbitt’s work was sharply interrupted late one morning in early December with an urgent message on the dictograph (the Disney company loudspeaker). Walt required to see the five committee members of the now-defunct Federation. When the group, led by Bill Roberts and Babbitt, arrived in Walt’s office, they faced Walt, Gunther Lessing, personnel director Hal Adelquist, and personnel manager Hugh Pressley. Walt was clearly agitated as he passed around a letter he had just received. It was from the Screen Cartoonists Guild, stating that the Guild had signed up a majority of Disney artists and that it was requesting a meeting to gain recognition at the studio.12 (According to evidence, this majority was an accurate count.)13
Babbitt described the conversation in great detail two years later: Walt was desperate for the Federation to reorganize in order to block the Guild (as it had with the IATSE), and he offered to sign a closed-shop agreement immediately.
Babbitt said that he would be ashamed to face the Federation members after a year and a half of negotiation refusals. Walt replied that if people on the outside told him how to run his business, he would do everything he could to resist them, and that if necessary he would close down the studio.14 He instructed Babbitt to call up the Federation’s attorney, Leonard Janofsky, to get to work laying out demands for a closed-shop agreement. Babbitt refused, confident that Janofsky wouldn’t work on behalf of management.15
The meeting had not gone as Walt had hoped, and he was cautioned (presumably by Lessing) not to discuss labor issues with his employees thereafter.16
At 10:00 AM the next day, Bill Roberts called the other ex-Federation negotiating committee members into his room, ready to revive the Federation. Babbitt, however, thought that using the Federation to block a bona fide union was “a dirty trick.” As far as he was concerned, he was through. Two of the other four committee members, including Norm Ferguson, agreed with Babbitt; one member was neutral, and only Roberts opposed.
Acting on his own, Roberts contacted Janofsky. The attorney said that he refused to work with the Federation any longer. When Babbitt heard this, he told Roberts that Janofsky certainly suspected that the Federation was a studio-dominated “company union”—a sham.
Within a few days, Roberts found a new lawyer—one who had handled an auto accident case for a coworker—and scheduled a Federation meeting at his home on Monday night, December 16, 1940.17
That night at Bill Roberts’s house, sixteen representatives across every creative department gathered to discuss the possibility of reorganizing the Federation. A stenographer recorded the meeting.
After Roberts briefed everyone, Babbitt spoke up. “I had no intention of being here at all tonight because if anyone was thoroughly disgusted, I have been,” he said. “Right from the start we have always maintained that not only were we trying to keep out an outside union, but we mentioned the specific outside union and that was the IATSE. We never said anything about trying to keep out unions in general. I have always made it very clear that my own personal standpoint has been that I have no bones to pick with unionism.”18
With his flair for pomp, Babbitt then read two sections of the National Labor Relations Act—one pertaining to workers’ rights to organize without interference, the other against company-sponsored unions.
“I don’t feel vindictive about the thing,” Babbitt continued. “I think it’s a misunderstanding on everybody’s part. If Walt had taken the trouble to find out what we were doing and why we were doing it, the contract would have been signed a long time ago. . . . I would have liked to have said to Walt, ‘Well, you’re the boss—whatever you say goes,’ and then I’d be a good boy. But still at the same time I feel I owe an obligation to all the people that have been foolish enough to follow me into this thing, and I can’t feel that it’s right. I really can’t.”
“Then you’re for the other union?” one of the artists asked him.19
“I’m not for any union,” said Babbitt.
“But you’re against this—what do you want to do?” asked the artist.
“We are going through a social change, and it is inevitable that there will be union organizations,” said Babbitt. “Every day the studio is dealing with electricians’ unions, actors’ unions, musicians’ unions—but aside from that, assuming that I was wrong, assuming that there wasn’t that change taking place, I can’t have confidence in what Gunther Lessing says today after all the times we have been stalled and pushed around and made fun of. . . . I’d like to oblige Walt, and I’d like to do what he wants us to do because all in all he’s been pretty square, but I don’t think that this [reviving the Federation] is going to do him any good or us any good.”
There was impassioned debate on both sides of the issue. “If this other thing gets in,” said one artist, “maybe the studio will go broke.”20
“As swell as Walt has been in the past,” said Babbitt, “I’m not polishing any apples, I’ve got my foot in too far—he’s never taken the trouble to see the other side. He’s firmly convinced that all unions are stevedores and gangsters. It has never occurred to him that he might find a decent person to deal with. . . . I do think Walt is very much in need of a little education along those lines. Now isn’t the time to do it. I think his feeling is so strong against these other unions, and one of the first things he can do to stop them is reorganize this Federation.”
The artists began comparing the salaries between Disney and MGM, and there was genuine concern with the discrepancy among the inkers, painters, inbetweeners, assistants, and junior animators.
“Personally,” said Roberts, “I’m convinced of this, that Walt all along has shown a tendency to neglect the people in those jobs, and I think some work would have to be done on them if we ever tried to start this thing. I think that’s the first thing we’d have to do, because Walt isn’t interested in them. He’s interested too much in what he called the ‘creative and inspirational help.’ And he isn’t interested and doesn’t respect those jobs where there is tedious but absolutely necessary work and hard work.”
Babbitt responded, “I’m actually under the belief that the guys that signed with another union signed because they were discontented, and I’m sure it wasn’t all salary.”
“What would it be if it wasn’t salary?” barked Roberts. “Fresh air? Opening the windows or something?”
The answer, of course, was job security. “You know everyone that gets fired has a grievance,” replied Babbitt. “That causes a lot of dissension, and it’s something like that that makes the guys want to join a protective organization.”
At the end of the meeting, the members voted to decide whether to hold a studio-wide meeting to revive the Federation or to let it remain inactive. Fourteen members voted to revive the Federation. And so the motion was carried.
As Babbitt drove home, he was left to wonder if anyone else agreed with why Janofsky had quit—that the Federation was, in fact, a company-dominated sham. He had read them the National Labor Relations Act, and he voiced the need of an independent grievance committee. He could feed them facts and figures, but like Goofy trying to close a magician’s steamer trunk, there was just no helping it. Disorder was on the horizon.