Disney will pay out $100M over wage-suppression claims

Joe Mullin

Ken Lund / flickr

The Walt Disney Company, including Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Two Pic MC, have agreed to pay $100 million to settle (PDF) claims that they conspired to lower the wages of animators and visual effects employees.

The agreement between the "Disney Defendants" and former workers could be the final settlement for a series of legal claims against entertainment and high-tech companies that were accused of having "no poach" agreements that limited how much they recruited each others' workers.

Combined with earlier settlements with Sony, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky Studios, the class of animator plaintiffs will get about $160 million, assuming US District Judge Lucy Koh approves the settlements currently on the table.

A series of wage-fixing claims ensued from a 2010 government antitrust lawsuit over recruitment at high-tech companies including Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe. The government said the companies agreed to limits on how they hired each others' workers, which artificially suppressed wages in the tech sector. That led to class-action civil claims against the companies on behalf of current and former employees. The claims against several high-tech defendants paid out $415 million in 2015.

The "Disney Defendants" $100 million payout represents about one-third of what plaintiffs' experts asked for in their report last year.

The plaintiffs in this case had already passed their most important test when Judge Koh allowed them to form a class in May. The class includes animation and visual effects employees who worked at Pixar, Lucasfilm, Dreamworks, Walt Disney, or Sony from 2004 to 2010 and at Blue Sky Studios from 2005 to 2010. In a report to the judge last year, the plaintiffs said they served notice via mail or e-mail to 10,828 class members in all.