VFX Forum releases ‘living wage calculator’ for Nuke
VFX Forum has released a ‘living wage calculator’ tool for Nuke: a free script that enables compositors to check whether their earnings fall above the UK’s new national living wage from directly within the software.
The tool is also available as a Python script for use with Maya, Houdini and other common DCC apps.
So what is the living wage, and why does it need a calculator?
Announced last year and introduced in April, the UK’s national living wage is a new mandatory minimum wage of £7.20/hour, which all employers must pay employees aged 25 and above.
Whether your hourly earnings fall above this threshold is, of course, something that you could work out without the aid of a Nuke script, but the living wage calculator is really there to make a point.
The tool was created to promote UK media and entertainment trade union BECTU‘s ongoing campaign against unpaid overtime in the creative industries.
By asking them to enter their annual salary and number of hours worked per week, the calculator is intended to encourage artists to think about the impact of unpaid overtime on their rate of pay.
As the accompanying blog post puts it: “Maybe that extra £2k they’re offering you to promote you to lead on the next show is not going to be all that great once you factor in all the free overtime the facility will be expecting!”
Some things to be aware of before downloading
If you do download the calculator, there are a couple of points worth noting.
First, it assumes that the figure for weekly hours that you enter is the number of hours you work every week, so entering a total for crunch periods won’t give an accurate figure for your average hourly pay.
The other is that the London Living Wage of £9.40/hour it mentions is a separate, voluntary figure calculated by campaign group the Living Wage Foundation, not a legal requirement.
But those points noted, it’s food for thought. If you regularly work a lot of unpaid overtime, the impact on your effective hourly rate of pay can be quite an eye-opener.