The Lasseter thing isn't the first scandal. It has probably been mentioned how Catmull got his revenge on Sony:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pix ... 01362.html
As somebody mentions in the comments section:
Sure this is disappointing, but not suprising. While I was at Pixar, Ed & John held several company wide meetings to discuss the fact that employees at Pixar were paid less then other studios in the industry. They framed the conversations with "if we pay you less, you will have stronger job security here. We wont have the hires and fires that other studios often have." It was a good angle to take and one that convinced everyone there to stay in line, work for less, while Ed & John made millions off the Disney Deal and who knows how much they profited off this too, most likely Millions as well. What's really sad is that they ask for loyalty from their artists & employees to a degree that would pay them less and give them a lower quality of life, and in return for that loyalty they repay their artists and employees with dishonesty and corruption in this horrible way. It's a shame that nothing will most likely happen with this, the same way everyone swept the insider trading scandal that was going on with Ed & John during the Disney Sale. Hopefully this creates an awareness across the board for all Artsists working at any studio in this day in age to remember that this is a buisness, and most people in business don't play nice.
From the book "The Pixar Touch":
Even employees who had been with the organization since its Lucasfilm days a decade earlier—employees who had lost all their Pixar stock in the 1991 reorganization—would be starting their vesting clock at zero. In contrast, most of the options of Catmull, Lasseter, Guggenheim, and Reeves vested immediately—they could be turned into stock right away."
'I decided, 'Well, gee, I've been at this company eight years, and I'll have been here twelve years before I'm fully vested,' " one former employee remembered. " 'It doesn't sound like these guys are interested in my well-being.' A lot of this piled up and made me say, 'What am I doing? I'm sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn't even appreciate.'
The 1991 Disney-Pixar contract thus required that Pixar enter into agreements with the so-called “key creative Pixar talent"—defined as Catmull, Lasseter, Guggenheim, and Reeves—to secure their services. Each of the four men was now in a powerful position: no employment contract, no Disney deal. To prevail on them to sign, jobs created a profit-sharing plan for them in February 1993. Sixteen percent of Pixar's profits on a film would go into a “profit pool," to be divided equally among the four. A couple of years later, as Jobs was planning for a public offering, they were at an advantage again; Jobs' advisers told him that investors would not accept such a rich profit-sharing plan for a handful of top employees, so he would need to induce them to give it up. On April 18, I995, Jobs and the five executives agreed to replace the plan with munificent stock options. Although Levy had not been part of the profit pools, he too had the clout to insist on generous options.
The fact that there was a business rationale for the uneven treatment did little to mollify those outside the golden circle.
"Steve spent lots oftime in people's offices, and I spent lots of time in people's offices, trying to explain that this is for the greater good of mankind," Kerwin said, "and if they win, we're all going to win. Some of them were threatening to leave."
Alvy Ray Smith also wrote to Catmull, where he asked why he wasn't given any credit for the creation of Pixar:
http://alvyray.com/Pixar/documents/edfromalvy_2004.pdf
One thing is if they are keeping the payment down so they can invest more in movies. It is still wrong, but more understandable. Another thing is to use it to enrich themselves. Even worse is when the whole industry is suffering from a working environment that keeps people down, both for the sake of their career and for robbing the world for great stories that will never see the light of day of that.
The reason why Lasseter's grabbing gets more attention is probably because this interests far more than just those inside the industry.
His absence could be a good thing:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/20 ... 864cd43912