They become the first ‘vendor-side’ VFX artists in the United States to formally file with the National Labor Relations Board for a unionization election.
This comes after they've successfully unionized VFX staffers at Marvel and Walt Disney Pictures--those occurred back in September and October respectively.
for those unaware, they basically hired a bunch of newly graduated vfx artists, put them under strict NDAs then basically got to abuse them for 16 years because portfolio is key and by the time people started to realize the movies were years & years away from release, if they left they would have years of no work besides work under NDA. add on top of that the brutal hours and working conditions almost guaranteed no time or energy for personal portfolios. also also if you know vfx/gfx industries basically every company has realllly unique pipelines with tons of internal tooling that rarely translates.
iirc it was basically an open secret by 2015ish that you didn’t want to work there bc it was a trap