Would be cool if there was a middle ground between risking destitution by claiming a share of the income made and giving up your fair share of the billions made in return of a modest salary.
The middle ground is usually to buy shares in your employer. In this case it seems like it’s the BBC who have hit the jackpot, so I guess the real winner is… the British public?
There is! You can negotiate a lower salary and higher participation. Obviously they have to want you, but when a show like this is starting up and not at all sure to even make it one season, an art director who would work for 25% pay and 1% of future profits would be snapped up.
The way around Hollywood accounting is to negotiate points on gross revenue or royalties rather than profit. That’s SOP in TV/movies for people with decent representation and the leverage to ask for it. Points on profit are largely seen the same way tech people view startup options.
Perhaps even via basically free 0.03% expense ratio index fund that automatically gives the owner access to business success across the entire economy.
Bluey is also made by the government, so technically, there is no equity gains or profit to be had at that level, it’s just a negotiation of compensation.
This is not a forum that is capable of factoring in power dynamics in any economic discussion. The market is always perfect, everyone has equal opportunities to capitalize on their own labor as an entrepreneur, just negotiate with your employer, etc.
She's an artist, not some poor wage slave. The fact she gets paid a living wage at all for doodling in a notebook is thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.
Van Gogh couldn't trade his paintings for stale bread.
The content is never less valuable than the marketing. Marketing and distribution is essentially a gatekeeper that maximizes profit, people would watch bluey without it but capturing the revenues would be more difficult.
Exploitation? Thousands of people are getting paid $90k to paint pointless characters nobody will ever see. It's not exploitation because one of them succeeds.
It's a technical term. She produced immense value and she didn't receive it, someone else took it. That's exploitation in Marxism.
I also don't get where you get these idea that there's this huge glut of artists producing work that's unpopular and getting paid for it. If you're at the point you're getting paid 90k a year, you're working in studios that almost certainly turn a profit.
The entire reason someone takes the risk is for the chance to have a ‘positive’ expected value, which in startup land means the company gets really big, hires a lot of people, and makes a lot of money for the owners (founders & investors) by selling a product for more money than they pay the workers.
Startup investors often treat this like an odds game, expecting that while 9 out of 10 investments might fail, one of them will return better than 10x, which turns into a net profit on investments.
The “risk” might be relatively big for small investors, but it’s quite low for the bigger savvier institutional investors.
Startups are economically interesting, but they are not the majority of the economy. When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
> Startup investors often treat this like an odds game
Yeah, it's not free profit though. If you're not good at choosing investments you end up with 9 out of 10 failing, and 1 only making 2x. That's what I mean by there are no guarantees of it
It's very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair.. and miss the 9 other shots they took which lost money. Or hell the 90 other shots, and they're still in the hole overall
> When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
Yeah these are definitely a different ballgame. Not sure where I stand on it - I don't know enough about the economics of that
I agree, and it’s objectively true, that there are no guarantees on investment. I don’t think GP was making any arguments that implied otherwise.
> It’s very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair
“Unfair” is subjective and an insanely deep topic we can’t even begin broach here thoughtfully. It’s always true that a profitable company has incomes that exceed its costs, by definition. Since costs include employee pay, it’s always true in a profitable company that employees are collectively providing a greater value to the company than they are capturing for themselves. You’re still arguing from a failed startup perspective, and by and large, failing and failed startups are not running the economy, nor are even a significant portion. The majority of people in the economy are working for someone else’s profitable company. People who have money do take risks on startups for the chance make it big, but those people had money to begin with.
Yeah unfair was the wrong word. I mean just to focus on exploitation in the Marxist sense suddenlybananas was using it
The economics are the same for a startup and established company, no? I was just talking about that because that's what Bluey was. Walmart was also once a tiny business and the returns are still happening today. We're all free to own part of them through publicly traded stocks. Of course the returns are a lot lower now simply because there's less risk
If they're extracting so much extra from employees that they're overpriced in the market, that leaves room for a competitor to offer lower prices. "Your margin is my opportunity"
If they're getting outsized margins by paying tiny salaries, it opens up room for a competitor to get the best people to work for them by paying more
Worker co-ops are still an option under capitalism, also
It's not a perfect system but it seems to work fairly well?
> those people had money to begin with
Well.. are we not posting this on a VC firm's website? There are options to getting money if you're starting with none
I can very much get behind removing generational wealth. That benefits no-one
> The economics are the same for a startup and established company, no?
No, I don’t think so at all. A startup founder and a startup investor are starting from completely different places and have completely different risks from a minimum wage Walmart or McDonalds employee, and they usually occupy different social classes.
Workers in a co-op are part owner, so they become, in part, the capitalists. They might be fractional capitalists, but they are part worker and part owner. That’s fine, and it’s not what Marx was worried about. Marx was worried about the plight of the laborer who gets no share of the ownership at all. Startup founders are sometimes also owners, they are capitalists. Investors are more pure capitalists, they use their money to buy ownership of companies in hopes of making more money. Stock purchases are also a way to be a fractional owner in a way, that’s one way to look at it. Most minimum wage employees don’t have any stock, most of the lower class doesn’t have any stock.
Nobody said that owners don’t take risks in capitalism. They do take risks with their capital when they invest.
> Your margin is my opportunity
Tell that to the low-paid & minimum-wage workers across the country. Somehow competition has failed to result in the minimum wage going up on its own. Somehow competition hasn’t eliminated the working poor.
BTW most of the ultra rich capitalists are wildly in favor of generational wealth, since it benefits them and their families. Historically it was true that the majority of ultra-wealthy people had inherited their wealth, despite all the rags-to-riches and startup stories we’re told.
It’s not weird at all; in other circumstances we call it a bonus.
You get baseline security by trading away the unlimited upside, but you are still incentivised to produce your best work by knowing if you help create a huge success you’ll get additional compensation for it.
This is an insane point of view. I genuinely don't understand how you can hold it. You don't think the person who actually made the product is the one who made the value? Do you believe in magic? Are capitalists just bestowing magic juju that creates value and any actual labour and hard work is irrelevant?
The product is a cartoon (and associated services, merchandise), not the idea. There were countless people involved in creating the set of products, even if just one person came up with the concept.
Sorry, I think we're talking cross-purposes here. I agree that the workers are the ones who should receive the profits. The art director is one such worker (out of many).
Not at all familiar with animation or the broader industry but could they have at least offered the potential for royalties or some sort of sales based bonuses?
I believe most of the value of Bluey is captured by the BBC. The whole thing is a real shame for Australia. We’ve had a couple of the best children’s entertainment ever: Wiggles and Bluey. Don’t know why they didn’t negotiate a bigger piece of the pie with Bluey.
Why didn't ABC fund the whole shebang? I suspect the BBC has a much bigger warchest to deploy - recalling the ludicrous amounts invested into Top Gear or the numerous David Attenborough nature shows.
Even the BBC war chest appears to be dwindling. Or at least it’s become harder to produce things on their own. The latest seasons of Dr Who are produced in collaboration with Disney.
But yes, they would have had bigger reach, and we might not have gotten this far without the BBC. I just want the ABC to have got a more significant chunk.
That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security