‘Saturday Night Live’ VFX Workers To Unionize With IATSE

Saturday Night Live‘s visual effects workers are officially unionizing with IATSE.

The 16-member bargaining unit, all of whom unanimously supported the move, have also received voluntary recognition by their employer, the union revealed Monday.

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The VFX workers’ unionization follows that of the sketch comedy series’ editors, who began a union campaign in 2022 and were similarly voluntarily recognized. That group ratified its first union contract last year.

While much of SNL relies on practical effects, the VFX workers are largely responsible for the pre-recorded digital shorts, like last year’s HBO Mario Kart trailer or the recent My Best Friend’s House music video featuring Ariana Grande. These shorts require tight time constraints, with sometimes as little as 12 hours to turn around a project.

“We deserve what every other department at SNL has, we deserve to be protected, we deserve to be represented, and we deserve to be on equal footing with the people we work directly side by side with,” VFX Lead David Torres Eber, who has worked on SNL since Season 46, said in a statement. “SNL is a very stressful show to work on while also being a very enriching experience full of creative problems to solve. We should be focused on those problems each week and not whether our insurance has lapsed or when we can schedule a doctor’s appointment after the summer hiatus ends.”

The effort to unionize VFX workers at SNL is part of a broader move by IATSE to represent these craftspeople across the industry. Positions such as art directors, camera operators, sound, editors, hair & makeup artists, costumers, script supervisors, grips, lighting, props, painters and many others historically have been represented by IATSE in film and television, but workers in VFX classifications have not

Earlier this year, VFX workers at Apple Studios declared intent to unionize with IATSE, and last year the VFX artists as Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures did the same.

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