Italian Animators Are Fighting Back. Is Anyone Listening?

Mattia Cavani

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This is an adapted translation of “È il momento giusto per l’animazione italiana" , a blog post written collectively and published on the website of Acta, the Italian Freelancers Union. I added a little context, where necessary.

On May 27th, 2026, Due Spicci, the third animated series by Michele Rech – the cartoonist known as Zerocalcare – premiered on Netflix. On the same day, an informal labor union, Un!ta , the Italian Union of Animators, opened an anonymous tip line on its Instagram page to collect testimonies about working conditions during the series’ production.

A first bit of context: Zerocalcare is one of the most prominent voices of the Italian cultural left – not a supporter of any party, but involved in many struggles of both national and local significance. Through his stories, he has given voice to the experience of younger generations on precarity, the search for meaning, and gender relations. His three animated series for Netflix are among the most successful in Italian history, with a following that extends well beyond Italy, particularly in South America.

The testimonies collected by Un!ta denounced not only poverty wages and grueling schedules, but also the use of bogus self-employment contracts. The timing of Un!ta’s initiative – coinciding with the release of the series, which had been heralded for months by a massive publicity campaign – brought the issue to the forefront of Italy’s public debate.

The reactions of the media, political parties, and labor unions to Un!ta’s initiative paint a paradoxical picture: silence from the far left, superficial coverage from the center, and passionate support from the right.

The main accusation – leveled primarily by voices on the left to delegitimize Un!ta – was that the organization was hiding the testimonies it had collected behind anonymity. This is a contradictory objection, considering that whistleblowing regulations – historically supported by the left – protect the anonymity of whistleblowers precisely because of their vulnerability in the workplace.

What followed was a strange political inversion: the debate shifted away from the workers’ grievances and toward the figure of Zerocalcare himself, with those who should have defended the struggle instead working to delegitimize it. However, this media flurry lasted only a few days. We at Acta , the Italian Freelancers Union, believe that Un!ta’s union initiative is an important milestone, a blueprint for organizing freelance workers.

The media outcry sparked by the publication of testimonies of exploitation has had positive and concrete results: in addition to raising awareness among hundreds of animators, it was followed by a parliamentary question requesting an inspection by the Ministry of Labor and an appeal to the European Parliament to investigate the animation sector in Italy and verify whether the working conditions constitute a violation of antitrust laws. In other words, companies that exploit workers are engaging in unfair competition against those that respect the wage standards of the Collective Bargaining Agreements.

This convergence between union action and antitrust enforcement is spreading across Italian creative industries – and it is precisely the kind of paradigm shift we have been working toward .

Let’s briefly retrace this story, starting with its key players.

DogHead, the studio behind Due Spicci

DogHead is Italy’s leading 2D animation studio, with a large operational headquarters in Florence.

It was founded in 2018 by Movimenti Production, which controls it and which, in turn, has been controlled since 2022 by Banijay, Europe’s leading television production group, the result of numerous mergers.

Crucial to the development of DogHead-Movimenti were the permanent audiovisual fund and the tax credit provided for in the 2016 Legge Cinema (cinema law), thanks to which Italian animation has evolved from a small-scale, artisanal operation to an industrial one. This growth has positioned DogHead-Movimenti as the go-to supplier for international streaming platforms: Due Spicci, like Zerocalcare’s previous two animated series, was commissioned by Netflix and produced by DogHead under a production contract.

There are other animation studios in Italy, such as Enzo D’Alò’s or Rainbow, but in a sector where DogHead-Movimenti sets the terms – winning the largest projects, defining industry standards, and outsourcing part of the work to smaller studios – their role remains secondary.

Essentially, it is almost unthinkable today for an Italian animator not to work, at least for a certain period, for DogHead-Movimenti.

Un!ta, Italian Union of Animators

The tax credit wasn’t the only engine of growth for the industry; in the last ten years emerged a lot of animation schools that have trained hundreds of very young workers – these are not graduate-level programs. With an expanding sector, labor-intensive work, and a young workforce, collective organization was only a matter of time.

At Acta, we’ve been monitoring the animation industry for years, ever since we studied it as part of the audiovisual sector in the research project Dietro le quinte . So in 2025, we tried to create a union for self-employed animation professionals. We reached out to some animators, encouraged them to take the leap, and they soon began to organize themselves. This was the original group that would go on to found Un!ta. They quickly set up a Discord server, and it soon had hundreds of animators. Now, the server has over 700 members.

Given these numbers, Fistel-Cisl, the media and entertainment branch of Cisl – one of Italy’s three main union confederations – stepped in and offered the group the opportunity to participate in negotiations for the renewal of the National Collective Bargaining Agreement (Ccnl) – the sector-wide contract that in Italy is negotiated periodically between unions and employers’ associations and sets minimum wages and working conditions for all employees.

Un!ta accepted the invitation and effectively closed the door on joining Acta. This split was a bitter experience for us, given the efforts we had put in, but it did not undermine our mutual respect or our desire to collaborate.

The official founding date of Un!ta – as an entity distinct and independent from Acta – is June 2nd, 2025, the day they published their first post on their Instagram profile:

We are a group of Italian workers in the animation industry, and together we want to build a more just, fulfilling, and sustainable workplace. Currently, there is NO space dedicated to discussion and support among animation workers in Italy, and the time has come to change that. If you’re tired of the current working conditions in Italy, if you believe it’s necessary to have an active community of workers like you, or if you just want to vent… WE’RE HERE FOR YOU.

In the months that followed, the group established that “mutualism of information” which forms the basis of so many union projects for self-employed, atypical, and precarious workers: it gathered information on compensation offered by companies, created a space to collectively evaluate and rank studios based on their working conditions, and conducted a survey on working conditions and incomes in the sector.

Meanwhile, during the negotiations for the renewal of the National Collective Bargaining Agreement, Un!ta raised the sector’s issues and called on the parties – Italy’s main union confederations and producer associations such as Anica, and Cartoon Italia (of which DogHead is also a member) to take action to address the sector’s structural irregularities.

In February 2026, following numerous reports from animators regarding DogHead’s job offers, Un!ta sent two certified emails (PEC, Italy’s legally binding equivalent of recorded delivery) to the studio, listing the issues and requesting a discussion and a change in conduct. DogHead never responded.

In recent days, we have received numerous consistent reports from professionals stating that they have received offers from your firm for full-time work as self-employed contractors, with estimated compensation of around 900 euros per month. In light of the current legislation and the National Collective Bargaining Agreement, these conditions are highly problematic in several respects:

  • the proposed employment arrangement appears incompatible with continuous, employer-directed, full-time work;
  • the compensation indicated is significantly lower than the minimum rates established for duties corresponding to the applicable contractual levels;
  • the combination of full-time work, self-employment, and the proposed compensation poses a serious risk of contractual irregularities and a severe economic imbalance to the detriment of workers.

Bogus self-employment and entertainment: an Italian problem

Un!ta places great emphasis on bogus self-employment because, particularly in large-scale productions, the nature of animation work makes genuine independence implausible. When dozens of people are working on the same scenes or frames, coordinating schedules, workflows and creative decisions is not a matter of personal choice – it requires direction. Workers who cannot set their own hours, methods or deliverables are, by any reasonable definition, employees.

Additionally, studios often require freelancers to work on-site using company computers, in part to prevent leaks.

In other European countries such as France and Ireland, animators are almost all employees hired on a fixed-term or permanent basis.

For Italian production studios, the advantage of classifying someone as self-employed rather than as an employee does not lie in social security contributions – in the entertainment industry, the employer pays these anyway, even for freelancers – but in the fact that the minimum daily wages set by National Collective Bargaining Agreements do not automatically apply to self-employed workers.

Bogus self-employment in animation functions as a form of social dumping, allowing Italian studios to undercut labor costs relative to their European competitors.

Un!ta’s decision to collect anonymous testimonies about working conditions on Due Spicci was not improvised. It grew out of years of direct experience in the sector – the shared knowledge accumulated on the Discord server, the understanding of industry dynamics built through surveys and direct engagement with workers – and out of the frustration of having already tried, and failed, to raise these issues through official channels.

This brings us to May 27th, 2026.

The day the stopped clock struck the right hour

Although we at Acta hadn’t been informed in advance about Un!ta’s initiative on Instagram, as soon as the first anonymous testimonies emerged, we reposted them on our social media channels and… waited for a journalist or perhaps a union representative to pick up the story. For several days after the post went up, only a handful of content creators had responded – the wait was nerve-wracking.

The newsworthiness of the testimonies was obvious, but it seemed that no one wanted to cover the story. On May 31st, Il Giornale, a right-wing newspaper (once owned by the Berlusconi family) broke the deadlock by reporting the testimonies, closely followed by outlets across the political spectrum. The news was disingenuously framed as: “Zerocalcare, the hypocritical leftist, exploits workers!”.

In the four days between May 27th and 31st, the left missed a crucial opportunity: to frame the story from the outset around the workers who had spoken out about their own exploitation, rather than allowing it to become a story about Zerocalcare.

The first to capitalize politically on the story was Maurizio Gasparri, a veteran right-wing senator from Forza Italia – the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi – and an unlikely labor advocate by any measure. Yet he took a sensible step: requesting an inspection by the Ministry of Labor to verify the testimonies of exploitation.

Meanwhile, DogHead Animation and Movimenti Production denied the allegations:

Both companies have always acted in full compliance with applicable regulations, as well as the rights and dignity of the individuals involved in their productions, conducting themselves in a manner consistent with the principles of fairness, legality, and professional responsibility, […] To date, despite numerous productions, we have never received any complaints through the institutionally recognized trade associations – to which every artist has the opportunity to turn and with which we continue to maintain a constant and open dialogue.

The employers’ associations Anica and Cartoon Italia have published press releases expressing solidarity with DogHead-Movimenti.

Netflix, which commissioned Movimenti-DogHead the production of Due Spicci, has never commented on the matter.

One wonders how the world’s leading streaming platform could remain indifferent to the reputational damage sustained by one of its flagship series.

Perhaps the executives at the American giant might find it interesting to know that DogHead reported profits of 1.6 million euros in 2025 (which, like its revenue, have been steadily increasing in recent years). Perhaps, to avoid further embarrassment, Netflix would do well to exercise stricter control over its supply chain.

On June 1st, 2026, Un!ta published a post in which, “following the enormous media attention of the past few hours and the statements released publicly,” it refuted DogHead-Movimenti’s accusations point by point. The post ended with a reflection: “We regret that a legitimate labor struggle has turned into a public shaming of a well-known figure such as Zerocalcare.”

The following day, Zerocalcare broke his silence with a video on his Instagram account. He described himself as merely the author, with no involvement in decisions about work organization, though he is credited as the series’ executive producer.

The two or three times I met with someone at their studio [at DogHead], no one ever voiced a complaint or said they were working in a critical situation. Actually, from the outside, it seemed like a pretty nice and enthusiastic situation to me… Well, I’m not stupid, it’s obvious that in sectors where they give you contracts one project at a time, it’s very difficult to assert your rights and organize protests or mobilizations. […] But there’s one thing that’s actually true amid all this madness: I’m still part of this production chain just like any other creator, so I think it’s only fair that we, too, make ourselves available to contribute to initiatives aimed at addressing these problems.

Recently, Zerocalcare revisited the issue in an interview with the progressive newspaper Domani titled “Zerocalcare: ’I thought I could be the megaphone for collective demands. Now I can’t do it anymore’”:

I got more or less what I expected: massive media exposure – whether related to the promotion of all the content Netflix had me create, feedback on the series, or all that stuff that’s now inevitable whenever I utter a single syllable – namely, a series of more or less specious controversies.

It’s not too late to support Un!ta

It’s truly unfair to lump Un!ta’s initiative into the cauldron of “more or less specious controversies,” given that this group has managed to achieve something that, in the mobilization of self-employed, precarious, and atypical workers, almost never happens: bringing to the center of the national debate the working conditions of a cultural sector that, as such, is at once idealized (the mantra of the “dream job”), rendered invisible, and kept afloat by an extremely fragmented workforce. Un!ta managed to achieve this in a sector where – as we noted during our interviews for Dietro le quinte and while writing this piece – everyone is aware of the widespread prevalence of unfair and/or illegal practices, but rarely has the courage to speak out.

Un!ta, just like the delivery riders’ unions, has managed to achieve something extremely difficult: politicizing what would otherwise remain an individual legal dispute over bogus self-employment. These disputes usually become lawsuits that either go to trial or are resolved through out-of-court settlements. In short, in the best-case scenario, the single worker is “saved” while everything else remains the same.

In addition to highlighting DogHead’s specific conduct, Un!ta has begun canvassing the broader industry – gathering expressions of interest from workers across the entire supply chain who may be willing to join a collective action. The exact form this will take remains open: it could be a class-action lawsuit, a formal complaint, or something else entirely. That will depend, in part, on how many workers come forward and what they are prepared to do.

Un!ta has done all this despite the near-total lack of solidarity with this struggle from the left. Unlike other labor disputes, such as that of the delivery riders, which in Italy have received broad political and media support, this battle has received no backing, under the pretext of objections raised regarding the method of anonymous reporting.

We do not want all of this story to be forgotten.

We have therefore decided to write to the Ministry of Labor to ask whether, following Maurizio Gasparri’s parliamentary question on June 3rd, the Ministry has taken steps to:

take all appropriate measures within his authority, using the labor inspection tools provided by law, to ascertain whether the reports in “Il Giornale” are accurate and to verify whether the production of the program “Due Spicci” for its contributors complied with the financial and regulatory standards applicable to this sector.

In our request, we will ask, among other things, whether the competent Labor Inspectorate (Italy’s workplace enforcement agency) has been notified, what the expected timeline is for the conclusion of the investigation, and whether the company’s declarations to INPS – Italy’s national social security institute – have been compared with the personnel costs reported in the financial statements.

You are welcome to write to the Ministry too, in English, Spanish, French, or whatever language you want. The email address is Dipartimentolavoro@pec.lavoro.gov.it . You can ask the Minister about the investigation and request information on the timeline and outcomes of the preliminary inquiry.

Let’s finally give Un!ta the solidarity that they deserve!

We may have little faith in the Labor Inspectorate, the Parliament, or Netflix to drive meaningful change. But power is never monolithic, and the contradictions within it are real – and exploitable. Courageous collective action is how we exploit them. It is never too late to stand with Un!ta.

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