Seth Green Allegedly Warned ‘Robot Chicken’ Artists That His Studio Would Move to Canada If They Unionized

As opposed to the artists of the computer animation community, stop-motion workers don’t have a labor union that can protect them from on-the-job hazards, ensure their livelihoods and advocate for them in abusive workplaces — and they never will, if Seth Green and Stoopid Buddy Stoodios get their way.

In a TV landscape where budgetary limitations and tightened production schedules has led to most animated shows sporting a soulless aesthetic “sameness,” the long-running Adult Swim sketch series Robot Chicken stands out as a bastion of traditional, “practical” animation. Stop-motion animation is, inarguably, far slower and more laborious than the computer-assisted alternatives, but Robot Chicken and its production company, Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, have almost single-handedly kept the art form alive — or, it would be more apt to say, the stop-motion artists of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios are doing the hard work of preserving the medium with every painstakingly staged frame of Green’s flagship series.

Back in 2016, those workers attempted to form a union, which would have been the first such organization for stop-motion artists in American labor history, but Green and the rest of the management team at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios successfully squashed the movement. In a recent and exhaustive breakdown of the demands from Stoopid Buddy Stoodios animators and the tactics used by Green to kill the collective bargaining effort, animation insider Steph ZD quoted an employee of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios as saying, “They told us that if we unionized they would move production to Canada.”

Among the many grievances of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios as reported by ZD recently and by the animation news outlet Cartoon Brew back in 2016 were the “lack of wage scale transparency, healthcare and poor scheduling.” According to Cartoon Brew, the starting salary for artists and animators at the Burbank-based Robot Chicken production studio hovered around $10 an hour, a ridiculous rate for anyone expected to pay rent in Los Angeles County.

In addition to the dismal livelihood, lack of benefits and long hours that Stoopid Buddy Stoodios offered its employees, stop-motion artists were allegedly expected to work with flammable materials and dangerous chemicals without proper personal protective equipment or safety procedures in place, all while inhaling hazardous particulates from the sets, props and models of the Robot Chicken universe. Current and former employees of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios even alleged widespread sexual harassment and a normalization of abusive workplace behavior by senior members of the company.

According to ZD, current and former employees of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios spoke to them about the working conditions both during the unionization push in 2016 and in the years since, with one individual claiming that the company “refuses to fire the same horrible predatory men because of their buddy system. They are loyal to men who’ve been there the longest, even if they are horrible monsters.”

Another added, “(Stoopid Buddy) were one of the most abusive places I’ve worked at. And they have no HR department to make things worse (they say they do, but they actually don’t).”

One even alleged financial impropriety on the part of Green and his Stoopid Buddy Stoodios cofounders Matthew Senreich, John Harvatine IV and Eric Towner, claiming, “(Stoopid Buddy) used down payments from future productions to pay off current/previous productions. So we had to put down different pay codes everytime in our time sheet. They had shows that were weeks behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget.”

In 2016, an anonymous Stoopid Buddy Stoodios employee posted a five-page, pro-union informational packet to educate their coworkers on the complicated unionization process and inviting other employees to sign digital union cards with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), a massive union for behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry that includes the Animation Guild. Shortly thereafter, Green allegedly co-signed an internal letter with his cofounders and posted it in the studio’s workspace along with an official seven-page anti-union response.

“We know there is talk of unionizing, and we want to express our positions as the founders of this endeavor,” Green and his team wrote. “We hope it doesn’t come to that.” In the sickeningly insincere terms of any company head whose employees are growing disgruntled with their treatment, Green entreated the “Stoopid Buddy Family” to read through their carefully prepared informative (or disinformative) packet before making any rash decisions, warning in barely veiled language, “It’s been a HUGE source of pride to have a studio in our own backyard, beautiful Burbank, California. We would like to keep it that way.”

As ZD broke down in great detail, the comprehensive company response to members of the “Stoopid Buddy Family” suggesting that employees aren’t being treated with respect or consideration followed the exact corporate playbook that every company facing such labor organization uses to sow seeds of doubt among their employees. Green and his co-founders argued that a union would destroy the company’s ability to remain competitive with other animation studios (the computer animation studios were already unionized and the industry managed to adjust), they claimed that the wages of top performers could very likely decrease if the union negotiates their contracts (union-protected employees make 11.6 percent more than non-union workers nationwide), and, of course, they shamelessly invoked the F-word at every opportunity.

“Stoopid Buddy’s budget is not that different than your family budget. What a family can afford to spend is dependent on what you and other family members earn," Green and his company wrote. “We view Stoopid Buddy as a family working together to produce great entertainment. In order for the family to function well, everyone needs to feel comfortable bringing any problems or issues they have to the attention of others in the family.”

Ultimately, Green’s anti-union campaign successfully convinced enough employees that collective bargaining couldn’t possibly be in their best interests, and the Stoopid Buddy Stoodios unionization effort failed. Today, anonymous employees fearing retaliation report the same grievances of poor compensation, a lack of benefits and an unsafe workplace as they did in 2016, but Green himself is plenty protected. Throughout the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of last year, Green was vocally and publicly pro-union, being a member of such unions himself, and he had no problem seeing through the bullshit excuses made by exploitative companies because he already knew the anti-union playbook, inside and out.

And, in a grand stroke of sickening irony, even though the union effort failed, Green and his ramshackle family business still went on to open a Stoopid Buddy Stoodios office in Toronto in 2021 in an attempt to outsource creative work to a country that’s even further behind the U.S. when it comes to animation unions. 

If that’s how Green treats his “family,” then CPS is a decade overdue for a wellness check.