Game Workers Unite
gameworkersunite.org
gameworkersunite.org
There are a lot of reasons why game workers need to organize, but it doesn't have to stop there. Tech workers in general can make the lives of their teammates a lot better by banding together.
We can also fight for the rights of others, why couldn't Amazon employees fight for the rights of Amazon's warehouse workers?
Also, things like discrimination and abuse are combated by organized workforces faster than they are by HR departments, especially when such abuse comes from managers. No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing. It requires an organization of labor to do that.
Equal footing how? If the "worker" and the company could be on truly equal footing, then there would be no point in having companies at all. The whole point of a company is for the company to have more resources than any one person is entitled to or capable of retaining. If you mean equal footing relative other employees, why would they have equal footing if every employee is inherently different from the next?
Things like the 40 hour workweek aren't just a result of market forces. Market forces by themselves literally worked people to death - life expectancy in Liverpool during the industrial revolution was 15. It was through organization and struggle that workers achieved the rights they have today.
You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some people.
There are things worth doing that require a large team working closely. More closely than a bunch of mercurial small businesses.
For example, a public school shouldn't need to employ janitors, it should just contract with cleaning companies.
Unfortunately, the high school systems in the US give people no education on starting small businesses so people lack the economic and practical knowledge on doing so.
And doesn't seem to be economically viable for everyone to do, or we'd already be doing it.
The main financial risk for people is that cashflow problems can lead pretty rapidly to homelessness or health deterioration.
I agree that the current framework makes freelancers and self-employed more vulnerable to cashflow problems, and it's an issue.
I've seen some interesting ways to mitigate it, even in my own country (with affordable health services for small business owners but they have salary caps that exclude IT workers)
None of the employees are happy with this situation, but job scared that they'll simply be replaced by those who won't complain, and blacklisted.
The rest of the employees, many who had moved to the area specifically for the job, couldn't even collect unemployment - I met one girl working at Uno's Pizzeria so she wouldn't become homeless and stuck in a distant state.
I believe its the use of layoff and such terminology, that gets them around laws
It is obvious to me that if you want an employee to not work for someone else, you need to pay them the same as if they're working for you. This is how things work at the executive level. This is how it should work for everyone. It is the least we can do.
The competitiveness and desire to work there is what drives these insane working conditions.
The big difference is this: If you have the skills to work in the gaming industry, you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately.
Nobody needs to work 100 hours a week on salary for at a AAA studio who will discard you.
The key message is this:
AAA productions are losing touch with their audiences and spending unholy amounts of money on garbage games. (this is accelerating just like Hollywood).
Unlike the poor actor/actress who has to suck Spacey/Wienstein's dick, YOU have options. Go work a boring 9-5 webapp job with benefits and then hack on a game with a few passionate friends with a vision of something AWESOME.
The Internet levels the playing field for us. Minecraft is an excellent example of this.
The game industry is not made up entirely of programmers! There are lots of other roles that do not map to the software industry such as animators, modelers and artists. They can't just switch to making enterprise CRUD apps. Even the programmers might have difficulty meeting the requirement of having 2-4 years experience on framework that got its first stable release in 2017.
"you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately"
If you are capable of learning how to use the apps necessary to be a animator/modeler you DO have the skills to work in another industry! Nobody is entitled to work whatever job they want wherever they want, and nobody forced you to take out loans to get a degree in Art/3d modelling or animation.
For example, I'd love to be a beer taste tester for 150k per year and live in downtown SF, but the demand isn't there. How would a Union of beer taster's improve the lot of people who want the job? They would establish rules to exclude up and comers with more talent who are willing to work for less.
The sad truth is a union will help people in the gaming industry just as much as a union would help the NBA. No matter what there will always be a shortage of jobs compared to the number of people who wish to work there. But the union will exclude a significant portion of people who are willing to work for less from competing at all.
Hint:(Similar to minimum wage, this is where unpaid internships came from)
So either you compete on price/working conditions, Or you end up with a Union cabal who set artificial standards of entry and keep out talented newcomers who are willing to work for less.
You have choice. Make good decisions.
Here is the Portuguese web site for football (soccer) just as an example, not going to list everything here.
If you're an animator there's plenty of gigs doing motion design in places you wouldn't consider.
I know a ton of ex-gamedev who've landed in these roles and done quite well.
[1] Interaction Design
Look at all the details in big games - people drawing those details are not programmers.
Conversely, inflexible labor markets are something that keeps third-world countries how they are.
I'd prefer something closer to SAG than the auto workers union personally.
While the tech is similar the project cycles are usually quite different so I don't know if one-size-fits-all would get splintered by different concerns.
The implication being made that game devs are some kind of sweatshop slaves is ridiculous.
The thing is they generally do quit, if you look at Gamasutra's yearly industry survey you'll see a huge bimodal distribution of less than 3 years and 10+ years. The average industry career ends up being about 3 years.
Here's a situation that I saw a lot when I was in the industry:
1. Get a new gig in a different town(usually because the previous studio cratered). Sell your house, move your family and get settled because this studio seems like it's being run sanely.
2. 4-6mo later crunch time hits. Mandated 80hr/week with 6-7 day work weeks. Anyone who takes even half a day off catches a ton of shit. Heck, I get yelled at for leaving the office at 11pm one day.
3. No funds(remember 30-50% less pay) or time to find a new gig and you've got a mortgage/rent/family to support.
4. Game fails/sucks because of crunch or other reasons. Studio closes/layoffs.
5. Repeat step #1.
I would hazard a good 80% of people in gamedev are paycheck-to-paycheck(I know we were). So while it's easy to just claim they should quit that's not as simple in practice.
The saddest thing (of this story)? This game, from a major mobile publisher, never even made it out of beta because their monetization component had no traction. As an aside, they also ended up scraping my tracks and replacing them with drone simple turn left/right then jump. Repeat. (because of the amount of work it was going to take to implement...)
That is one of too many stories. Truth is, nearly every/maybe all game development studios is poorly managed.
I have wondered if the high failure rate is a mismatch of three key issues; passion and understanding for the medium in the company culture, management not knowing how to manage technical/artistic creators, and then the fickle nature of the target market.
Great games made by amazing developers can tank because they don't have the business chops. Management can't get a handle on what they are actually managing, because that has proven notoriously hard even when the software product isn't nearly as complicated as a game.
Even in ideal circumstances with a great team, game, and execution, your game can flop because it just wasn't flavor of the month or you released behind a more favored title.
I would love to hear what people think a great studio would look like.
they do, iirc after about 5 years, typically.
But I see no reason why this couldn't eventually blossom into a "Software Developer's Guild".
At least in Europe most countries do have support for developers on their unions. It is up to each one to decide which one they want to join.
In a way that's what labor laws and minimum wages are... a gov't mandated union of employees.
:)
But to offer a different answer to “why just games” - this particular effort is newsworthy right now because it was organized to be promoted heavily at GDC, which I believe just ended.
I think it's unwise (from my armchair) of game companies to build their business on a cycle of crushing the dreams of young people, but it's voluntary, obvious, and well-warned.
Apple, google, and other companies we're already found working in a cartel to keep software engineer wages down, and those were just the high profile explicit agreements.
I don't get people like you who find it ok for corporations to pool capital and output from all their employees in the negotiation process, but the second employees want to work together to even the playing field it's a deadly sin
Maybe the game industry is the best place to start a tech union as a proof-of-concept, given that (if the stereotypes of game studios are true) it has a higher proportion of employees aren't too happy about their relationship with their employer than other parts of the tech industry where the pay and working conditions are better.
Not specifically for IT, rather something general like "industrial jobs" for example.
Also in those countries where engineering degrees are regulated, you can also appeal to the Engineers Order if something is going wrong.
A Tier-1 has benefits such as $108/day toward healthcare, retirement. Pay rates in the range of $21-26/hr.
That said, i know of plenty of super-low budget indies that are just too small to use the contract -- the union often doesn't mind, and union workers will still do these 'passion projects' because they love the work
Large budget films use unions because we are the only ones skilled enough to do it properly & professionally; you just can't find 200 non-union to pull it off, not without someone getting hurt in the process, or having a terrible end result
Basically union dues are currently split between an administrative category and a political category (my terms, can't recall what they're actually called). Administrative covers the costs arising from actual contract negotiation and enforcement. Political covers anything dealing with lobbying or advertising etc (eg. vote Bill Murray because he supports unions).
Currently the political category fee does not have to be paid by non-union members (a free speech issue). The administrative category has to be paid by everyone covered by the contract whether union member or not.
The case in front of the court is to stop making the administrative portion mandatory... somehow because of free speech.
Personally I think it's a bit nutty. Someone that receives the benefits of collective bargaining but doesn't want to pay a cent towards the costs has got a screw lose.
If the SC decides the admin fees are not mandatory then unions are going to have a tough time. If enough idiots opt out of membership the union will not be able to afford a solid contract negotiating team or even an enforcement team. This will let companies strike contracts that are much more in their favor. And presumably the employee's will blame the union and more will opt out... until the union is no longer financially viable.
Let alone what it will do to union's lobbying and political efforts.
Right-to-work legislation in a nutshell, and it worked.
A “startup” that drone-feeds pigeons in the park could make the case that I enjoy the benefits of well-fed pigeons, and that I should be prepared to pay.
As great as pigeons are, I might feel diminished by the startup’s posture, which betrays low esteem for my ability to allocate my resources.
They don't always agree, but that's what the monthly meetings are for. Eventually everyone agrees on the scope of governance.
Is this the kind of want that is distinct from what they say they want?
But you don't want to do the actual work of coming up with a set of rules for everyone to live by. For the very good reason that that crap is hard and thankless and nobody's going to agree with every rule.
So you empower a homeowner's association to do it for you. This is a form of governance empowered to set rules that the neighborhood has to follow. Residents just have to pay the dues in order to ensure that their wishes are followed.
Self-management in this case is calling the cops and hoping they can sort your neighbor out.
You call it governance when you have to impose rules on others. It's annoying and ugly but someone's gotta do the job of exercising the will of the many onto the few that don't feel like they should follow the rules.
If you don't want to live under an HOA, you don't buy into a community that has one.
It was found recently that right-to-work states have a far higher worker injury & death rate than non-RTW, and lower wages. Its a race to the bottom.
A lot of people here (not you particularly; just that I might as well say it somewhere) have a very stereotyped view of what a union does, seeing it as some kind of compulsory enforcer that ties its members hands and goes around stopping outsiders working. I can't speak for everywhere, but my experience of unions in the UK is very different. Maybe this union could be modeled on that kind of approach. There's also the German Betriebsräte style which looks really interesting.
For an industry full of people that spout about disruption and how things are different and what new technology can do to empower people, there seems to be this picture of "unions" stuck inside people's heads that involves Jimmy Hoffa sending some thugs round to smash up your workshop because you sold product without going through the union, and large mafioso "encouraging" workers to join. At risk of massively generalising, that picture seems strongest inside the heads of our US colleagues; is the anti-union propaganda particularly effective there, or are the unions particularly stuck in that stereotypical Jimmy Hoffa style?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_Kingdom
> All forms of closed shops in the UK are illegal following the introduction of the Employment Act 1990. They were further curtailed under section 137(1)(a) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (c. 52)[7] passed by the Conservative government at the time. The Labour Party, then in opposition, had supported closed shops until December 1989, when it abandoned the policy in accordance with European legislation.[8] However, Labour shadow arts minister Thangam Debbonaire announced to an Equity conference in May 2016 that she favoured the introduction of a "limited" closed shop for actors, as part of Jeremy Corbyn's pledge to strengthen and introduce a new package of employment rights beneficial to employees.[9] Equity was one of the last trade unions in the United Kingdom to offer a pre-entry closed shop until the 1990 act.[9]
1990 is well before my experience, but soon enough I expect to be telling people how I was there for the crash of September 2000, before they were born.
Is “many unions don’t” really a good argument? If some unions do, we could discuss whether the Game Workes union would, as go does.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that today in the US a new union will not be able to make everyone stop writing game software. What do you think? Is that within their power?
As someone who eats, sleeps and breathes automation projects you (probably) won't find somebody more worried about the human costs of automation than me. 90% of our job as an internal development team is to reduce labor costs by automating various tasks, and while we continue to grow staffing because we have continued to grow our list of contracted facilities there will be a day (even if it's a decade or more away) that REDUCTION in workforce is a possibility - I fear that day, and I can only hope by that time our civilization is prepared for it.
> Be positive my friend, I’m sure we’re capable of creating a new type of union in 2018.
We've always been capable, unions people complain about are almost always a direct result of poor participation by members - if you want things to change make your voice heard and vote on union issues, it's no different from politics in that fashion.
The end of collective bargaining is the end of the free market.
It's very easy to understand the negative realities of unions, but nobody starts a union for fun. It's risky business. Industries are classically given plenty of chances to adjust. Sometimes they even do. That's why it's called bargaining. Small businesses, products, brands, they all work on this same principle. Go complain to Consumer Reports!
You have explained why the game industry is able to take advantage of people, but nobody asked. It's well obvious. The question is whether you find the behavior acceptable. I cannot relate to punishing people for wanting a career in an $18.4 Billion industry. Maybe it is a privilege. Some would call it the American dream. Many colleges promote these degrees. Maybe that is where you should direct your anger, because the result of corporations exploiting labor is no mystery to history.
Additionally, things like agency fees, where even if you work somewhere with a Union, and you are denied membership, and member only benifits you can still be required to pay the union, for their "collective bargaining benifits."
There are also the nightmares of union fiefdom, if a light bulb burns out in your office and you want it changed, you can wait till a union employee comes to do it, or you can pay the union the minimum call out fee (usually a couple of hours) after doing it yourself.
Unions have completely failed at protecting retirement plans, and preventing age discrimination across the country.
I can't understand how anyone can honestly evaluate the performance of unions in the last several decades and think that implementing one would in anyway make for a better work life situation.
Then there are also unions for more middle to higher class groups. Writers unions, actors, professional athletes, teachers.
Unions exist to fight for labor's rights.
I can't speak to how unions are all over the country, and I can't deny that unions have played a positive role in the day to day lives of workers.
But what I've personally seen working in heavy industry, both the stevedoring and the steel industry. Is that unions serve themselves first, and their members secondly, and if those places that have union security agreements.
The unions force non-members to basically make their lives hell.
At the same time, the union agreed to a salary freeze for all its members for a 3 year period. It doesn't matter if you are the best at what you doing in the world, we couldn't compensate you more to retain that employee if we wanted it.
Ask anyone who works in the Port of Los Angeles about the unions, they have locked out all technologies from automation or even telemetry unless those companies sign contracts with union vendors, etc.. etc..
My opinion isn't based on theory, or propaganda, It's from seeing everyday. Which, I highly doubt most of the people condemning my viewpoint can say.
"Back when the government first tracked workers' hours in 1890, full-time manufacturing employees worked a backbreaking 100 hours each week. Years of pressure from laborer organizers, along with changes from companies like Ford Motor, reformed working conditions in the U.S. and protected workers from schedules that endangered their health and safety."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-chang...
But my employer can't legally do that without paying massive penalties. So I have to take a part-time job on the side for much less money per hour.
Game Workers Unite is a broad-reaching organization
that seeks to connect pro-union activists,
exploited workers, and allies across borders
and across ideologies in the name of
building a unionized game industry.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Libertarianism#/History
Furthermore, modern day "libertarianism" in the USA has more to do with Objectivism/Egoism (Ayn Rand) Individualism(Individualist Anarchism). https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Libertarianism_in_the_United_Sta...
Versus American libertarian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITP93pqtdQ
Lobby for improvements in labour laws to protect employees -scrapping non competes for example:
Representation: In Discipline & Grievance, labour or employment triburnerals.
Also as a source of pay rates etc ala BECTU, IATSE who also represent a lot of freelance workers and managers.
Things like open salaries, control over agile process, overtime for on-call, overtime pay for crunch times, more control over hiring / firing.
The mistake of these Marxist organizations is that they assume that workers are interchangeable parts. Maybe on an assembly line that is true, but engineering software or hardware or designing things? You can train someone to install a windshield in a Ford plant. You can’t really train someone in problem solving or creativity.
I am an individual; I am not a member of a “collective.”
SAG members don't all get paid the same ie Matt Damon doesn't get the same as say some lucky actor whos landed a lead role in pilot season.
And don't take this wrong you may think you are special but your employer doesn't
Why do you have disdain for other workers, who largely share your economic and political interests?
To put some numbers on it: you're at $100k and Alice is at $90k (because she's a woman?). After unionizing, you'd get $110 and Alice would get $110.
Would you do it?
Any evidence of this in practice?
> After unionizing, you'd get $110 and Alice would get $110.
Or maybe you'd both get $100, or maybe one of you would never be hired. You've got your hypotheticals, I've got mine.
2. You didn't answer my hypothetical, but I'll answer yours: If my salary doesn't change but Alice gets a raise, good for her, doesn't bother me. If I never got hired I don't care about Alice's salary, likewise if she never got hired. Anyway, the parent comment complained "why would I want my salary to be the same as everyone else?" so that's what my hypothetical gets at.
2. I am bothered if co-workers make more than me even when I am more important for the project and do more.
Just like when I win in the stock market, that money comes from Warren Buffet's earnings.
You are arguing that you should get more than the other guy, when in reality a decent contract can guarantee you both more than you alone might have earned.
And you are a member of a collective - society.
But are you really? If you don't know what your coworkers are making then you might actually be the lowest paid.
:)
The workers with a democratic process negotiated with the management. You’re not special. Why should your unwillingness to participate impact the rights of others who freely entered into an agreement?
Well, that's not what I said though. I said a right to pursue employment. That is, to be free to negotiate for an agreement with no forcible terms, to exchange something you have for something you want more than what you're exchanging.
Whatever you’re negotiating yourself, 9/10 times you’re still an at will employee and really have no bargaining power. Individual negotiations for jobs are like buying a car — every dude is telling you how they beat the dealer. I’ve hired many many software people over the years and almost never leave a fairly narrow salary band — maybe 5% of cases. Offering a few percent over average is usually enough.
If you find yourself at a studio with poor working conditions, know that there are plenty of studios that better respect you and your time. Hopefully unionization, or at least the threat of it, will raise the floor on the conditions and compensation for the employees most often exploited: contractors generally and QA specifically.
Either an overwhelmingly high amount of developers join a game developer union and raise salaries, or a company will simply hire someone else.
The compensation for game workers sucks compared to their counterparts in other software fields. This is probably because it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce.
It is a good idea for game industry workers to form a union or guild.
it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce.
Yes, we can educate others who want to enter the industry, but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt, you'll accept the poor working conditions for long enough and the cycle will continue to perpetuate.
The best protection against predation is for the prey to act together. Predators will always divide and conquer and go after the weak, and so the weak must be protected. The other way is increased competition - but our environment is becoming more and more anti-competitive.
is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor
but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt
Low pay. Low prestige. Long hours.
I mean, give me two of those and maybe I'll consider the sexiness.
Don't you think it's that a lot of young future-Salesforce-developers think that making games will be a lot more like playing games than it really is?
(PSA: Making games usually is not at all like playing games, unless you're really into grindfests.)
My only guess is that gamers think games are way sexier than the way Salseforcers think about Salesforcing, and so maybe game devs get a little more hero status than Salesforce devs? Something like that?
Do most actual game developers think, "whoa, this work I'm doing is so sexy"? I don't know that they don't. I've just never heard it.
I'm sorry to all the sexy game devs I've slighted by these opinions. It is not at all my intention. Keep on with your sexiness.
I just want those poor bastards in QA to get overtime or full time benefits.
- Protection for under performers alongside high performers. Difficult or darn near impossible to terminate employment. Ability to enforce performance evaluation and plans could be killed by the union. Common in teacher unions.
- Without being able to measure performance, pay may be solely based on tenure, not skill.
In fact, the three times I have seen companies terminate employment after somebody was put on a PIP it was directly related to other mental health issues the employee was going through at the time. Anecdotal m, obviously, but this complaint about unions smells bogus to me, since a common complaint about the tech industry is about blood sucking low performers that stick around long past they’re due.
As for measuring performance I again fail to see any company that does an adequate job of this with heuristics that aren’t at least partially, and usually fully, based on tenure.
In short, what makes you think we’re good at these things now, such that unionizing would make them worse.
Though generally what happens is employees get basically cost-of-living raises indefinitely. Over a decade or two, the company ends up with a half-price employee, compared to market rates.
Also we don't have to be good at evaluating employees to get worse at it. Giving raises on certification and seniority will make engineers chase promotions and titles instead of solving problems and finding managers that appreciate the work.
As far as I can tell everything you're describing is the primary way that people are currently promoted and how compensation is decided. The real unicorns aren't companies with billion dollar valuations, but companies where you can just focus on solving problems and have your manager recognize that with compensation and promotion.
Just like unicorns... they don't exist.
I still feel like my question stands. Are we actually so good at these things now that unionizing would actually harm us? Or is this claim that unions will make it harder actually just hand-waving and ignoring the fact that we're already terrible at this kind of evaluation only we (workers) have no recourse against a feelingless corporate structure that exists to min-max productivity and compensation for the benefit of shareholder value?
EDIT: I'll also add, although obvious to some but worth mentioning, that an effective game-dev union needs to help both those people equally.
There are very few individual roles in games. Even leadership roles are highly dependant on their teams (just look at what happened to Visceral if you want an example). And there is a lot of interdisciplinary interaction too, so even if there were separate game programming, game design and game art houses, there is no guarantee their could work with each other in a productive manner. At best you can separate QA and some art teams, which already happens all the time.
There is always version lock in at some point, and NO workers like change if it's going to cause them to lose their livelihood. This has nothing to do with unions.
Why do you care more about protecting artificial constructs like companies at the expense of power given to people building the products?
The argument is much more nuanced than you’ve proposed.
For example, when the ACA passed, unions were more concerned with their constituency and their carve outs than with decoupling employment from healthcare. Same story for all the business interests.
However, the whole firing topic is really only filling up a fraction of unions' time. Unions' main tasks are overwatching safety regulations, crunch times, etc... so that the actual time spent at/for the company is better quality whise. This leads to happier, healthier programmers which should be in their employer's interest as well, see e.g. negative press and lack of battle proven personel at telltale.
A union would go nuts in that scenario. Which then supports the theory that unions would oppose technology that improved efficiency since they would care more about the protecting the production input than they care about optimizing the production output.
This article is one of many discussing the dawn of truck automation in very much detail: https://teamster.org/news/2018/01/teamsters-union-perspectiv...
As you can see unions are in fact discussing this very broadly without jumping to easy conclusions.
Automation by ML is a complex topic on all levels. We are just at the beginning of what will be very interesting times regarding policing automation, ML, and AI.
Unions protect workers from being exploited and abused. If you're not happy with how some employee performs, you can still fire him in place. But be ready to prove it. No more firing people on a whim just because.
If game industry isn't sustainable without exploitation, then we need it to adapt, and not the other way around.
How do you prove that an employee took two weeks to find a bug that should have taken one day to find?
How do you prove that writing a domain-specific language was a bad decision compared to defining a complex XML schema?
How do you prove that an engineer is bad at explaining technical concepts?
I do think employees need organization and culture to negotiate better in the short term and manage health and career in the long term. But I don't see evidence that either the employer or the union leadership have the right incentives to meet those needs.
Email archives of PIP goals and the like. But that doesn't even matter. All you really have to do is prove you didn't fire them because they asked for OT pay they were owed.
Yes a Union cant stop some one being fired if they are guilty of Gross misconduct but they can make sure people don't get fired for say accusing a manger for unwanted touching or to make wahy for the CEO's nephew.
For example I bet James Danmore had no advice before his internal hearings that lead to his firing.
"Could be killed by a union".. yes, or they could be killed by corporate policy or management that lets rules slide for employees they like.
Your example of teachers unions is a bad one, as they often get villified. Yet, we know there are multiple reasons for a so-called "underperforming" teacher, multiple solutions that help, and the fact that one has to be able to replace the teacher if you let them go, all complicating the issue.
"Pay may be solely based on tenture, not skill" Note your use of "may be". Tenure-only pay is often used for jobs that you can't measure the skill of one person against another: Factory jobs, for example. These often still have a pay range, giving more for folks with education than those without, for example. What changes is generally transparency: Skill measures and the evaluation of those skills needs to be communicated to employees in ways they can meet and/or improve them. In addition, these same issues happen outside of unions as well.
Union bonus is, that when your a-hole boss has a grudge and fires you for a bogus reason, you can dispute it, and possibly get your job back too.
Our contracts also spell out specific job titles and positions, and pay rates accordingly - a guy who only sweeps gets $x, where as a special effects technician gets nearly 3 times that amount.
Once, I had this guy who owns a big gaming company and I asked him the same question, why do you treat these employees, unlike other software companies?
He said, there was a time when he no one would apply for open job listings at his company because they had less money or they were not very hot. And that he understands, he can push the people around as he has earned it. So, it seems there is some revenge and ability to justify worse at work here.
What can you do? There aren't that many successful companies and the even if there are, they aren't growing as fast as your SV startup, so they do not need increasing supply of labor.
There are also small things companies can do to make the lives of their employees better that are sometimes impossible to negotiate as an individual. Unified teams can negotiate some of these things.