Powerhouse Animation has chosen to voluntarily recognize The Animation Guild’s (TAG) artists and production workers union in Texas.

Looking to achieve a better work/life balance, career training and pay, 129 artists and production workers at the service studio that has worked on Mattel TV’s Master of the Universe: Revelations (pictured) for Netflix and Nickeloden’s The Adventures of Kid Danger got together in April to demand a collective agreement. They can now start negotiating it. 

TAG has already secured a collective agreement for workers at Powerhouse’s LA studio, as well as ratifying its first one with Titmouse in New York last month. It calls this latest development an “historic” voluntary agreement because it makes Texas the first right-to-work state (employees aren’t forced to join or pay dues to unions, but are still protected by the collective bargaining agreements) to have union-represented animation workers.