Nearly Half of Game Developers Want to Unionize
engadget.com
engadget.com
No idea if unions are the solution, but this is definitely an issue specific to the game industry right now.
While I hope that the issues you mention above plus the cycle of game launching after a massive deadline crunch leading to development teams searching for new jobs (ie less stability), I don't know that it will happen. Why? People buying games.
Personally, I tend to buy the top tier of a game if for no other reason than they typically include the game/season pass (or whatever branding they go with) so that I don't have to manage it after the fact, of the games or expansions I bought recently, they've been the highest tier available: Assassin's Creed Odyssey, State of Decay 2, World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth, Tekken 7, Destiny 2 Forsaken (which I really haven't played. Still in the Osiris area. Eh, oh well), Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Division. To me, the fidelity of the graphics and scope of the games (in that most everyone is chasing epic stories now and if it isn't 30+ hours, it is too short) means the price should bump up beyond $60 so while the tiers of games seems like a dirty move, it seems to me that it is so they can sell you $60 worth* of a $100 game instead of you looking at a $100 game and scoffing entirely.
So basically, until people purchasing games are willing to accept that a AAA game in 2019 takes more resources to create than a AAA game in 2009, I don't see this ever getting better.
* the $60 version is a full game and not 60% of one though so in reality at that price point you're getting way more value.
Diablo 3 base game - if you beat that, have you not beat the game? The DLC adds a new act to it, but for all intents and purposes it is an add on to a game.
I've never seen content held back or cut out of a main release explicitly for the purpose of including in DLC. What sometimes happens is that features or half-finished content that the team decided to cut from the game is revisited for DLC. From my perspective as a game developer, modern games are never finished but at some point you have to start shipping things. DLC is an opportunity to explore ideas that would have otherwise been left on the cutting room floor, and provide some stability for large teams as they ramp down from full production.
This has become a meme at this point [1], but has anyone actually studied this in any type of academic or scientific manner? There are plenty of the games that have DLC, after release support, or any number of other revenue streams that would 100% be considered "complete games" by any reasonable standard. I know it is anecdotal, but compare Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Zelda: Ocarina of Time or FIFA 19 to FIFA 08. The release versions of the two newer games were probably more complete than the older versions even though they have DLC and micro-transactions respectively while the older were "done on release". In those two cases the extra revenue streams are helping to justify and pay for the continued support of the newer games.
[1] - https://www.ranker.com/list/dlc-memes-gaming/robert-carneval...
But, the crunch does not happen because it would be effective. It is not effective way to create something. It happen because of mismanagement and culture that glorifies it - both among managers and workers. Crunch is more related to desorganization and lack of trust then something that would be smart to do.
Games made in 2019 have a larger audience than games made in 2009. I don't pay 600 dollars for a ticket to see a movie with a 300 million dollar budget. I pay the same as a movie with a 10 million dollar budget. Memento had a 9m dollar budget; I have not been 30x more entertained with a movie than Memento.
Also, it's easy to claim that one "wants" to unionize on a survey. But that's quite a bit different from actually doing it. So I would take this survey with a large grain of salt. It's not like most game developers couldn't get other sw dev jobs if they wanted to, after all.
If you want to know what people really value, ignore what they say and focus on what they actually do.
Disclaimer: have worked for game companies before
I think if most of them could 'tick a box and join the union' they would - whereas actually establishing a union would be hard, yes.
There could be some terrible fallout as well - companies shutting down studios and opening up another one elsewhere etc..
It's not as clear-cut as "unions are always good for all workers."
Game devs are hardest hit by bad conditions, but every worker in every company would benefit from collective negotiation -- use your imagination, you could have a much higher salary, more flexibility in your workplace, more autonomy, you name it. That's what unions do, they let you bargain for the things you can't as an individual.
Lamentably, there's still a lot of folks in the software field who see themselves as the rock star, rather than the rank and file.
Also lamentably, there's still a lot of perception that a union means: you can't fire dead weight (you can, you just have to follow a process), pay is based on seniority (doesn't have to be, but what's wrong with that anyway? we don't have a good way to measure productivity or value, so what other metric should we use?), that they're corrupt (they're democratic institutions, so they're as corrupt as the members make them), etc.
All of it anti-union propaganda that's been working pretty well for the last 40 years.
Of course unions can be corrupt, but the only thing more corrupt than a union is management.
People in most tech firms are not clamouring for a union.
When people are talking about it, it's for a reason.
If you make a movie, everyone involved is 'union'.
I don't see why gaming should be any different.
In that case you could view union membership as insurance, in case you ever lose that great job. Keep in mind that your local pipefitters union is not the only model out there - SAG-AFTRA seems to work for actors/actresses across a broad range of income, experience, and talent levels.
https://www.sagaftra.org/membership-benefits/steps-join
Worked over a decade in indie films, never heard of any producer having a problem getting SAG to recognize paperwork.
https://www.entertainmentcareers.net/acting/how-to-join-sag/
Games releases are seasonal so a common practice is to hire for an xmas release and gut the teams after that.
Shady bonus practices are common. You often have very little recourse into how yearly profit is calculated and paid out.
The separation of studio managing employees and publishers holding on to IP means that studios can close up shop without the rights holders being liable for any back pay or bonus.
Alternatively, if you dig in, and refuse to deal with that bullshit, quitting, or being dismissed for not being a team player, half-way through crunch on a shitty project is a great way to burn bridges in that industry.
I don't doubt it, and your comment supports my original point: that there is a surplus of devs willing to tolerate such conditions. If that were not so, quitting would not be near as much of a problem for one's future employment prospects, because employers would not have as many candidates to choose from in the first place.
This is exactly the reason why I don't want to pursue a career in game development. I find games exciting but that doesn't make it feel worth to me to make compromises in pay and working conditions. Instead it can just be a hobby.
There is no one EA or Activision experience, they are very heterogeneous entities.
The film industry figured out long ago that they need to treat their employees with respect by giving them predictable hours, fair compensation for overtime, and guarantees that they won't lose health/retirement benefits across projects and studio closures. I do believe the game industry will get there eventually, but it seems it will take a lot of kicking and screaming.
There's no slavery here. I've been there. Unlike the people making your shoes in Bangladesh, everyone making your games is there because they love it. These are talented individuals who could easily go work in other industries.
People in the industry want better conditions, and more power to them. But this is not slave labor and no one is stuck in the game industry.
What you're saying is tantamount to not buying a painter's painting because he worked too hard on it. Trust me... the people you think you care about want you to buy the games.
That's simply not true. I'm sure most of them entered the industry for the love of it, but that doesn't mean they love their current job or being expected to work long hours.
> These are talented individuals who could easily go work in other industries.
There's a lot of shovelware in the games industry and I doubt many people love working on it. Do you really think the people working at studios churning out hanah montana games love their jobs? At best their hoping to work on something better in future, at worst the probably can't move elsewhere.
It can be a lot harder to break out than you think, the type of skills a game developer would have aren't in high demand in a lot of places and they could be missing some important skills used in the the more general industry, like SQL. This is an industry that loves to type cast, even something like getting a c# job as a java developer can be tough.
And then you've got the non-developer jobs. Graphic artists, writers and music composers don't have nearly as many options available.
The reason there is so much shovel-ware is because there are so many people interested in making games. So many individuals involved in shovel-ware are talented. Perhaps not the best artists, or game designers, but certainly have enough technical chops to do other work.
That's a capitalistic outlook though. I don't particularly subscribe to "choice" or "free will" in general though to be honest..
If anything, it's harder to get into the games industry than to get out because there is relatively more competition for gamedev jobs than for other sw dev jobs. So I would argue that if you can get in, you can get out, and when getting out you have the added advantage of being more experienced than when you got in.
Maybe people are working themselves super-hard to make indie games, but it's self-directed and totally by individual choice. Tons of great indie games out there.
E.g. want to hire a union programmer for your 3-person team? Whole studio has to now follow union rules and bring all other developers into the union as well. Forever.
So are people working for regular employers making video games. There's just more people who want to make games than work on insurance calculation (etc) software. That's why wages are lower.
The gaming industry notoriously wildly swings from boom to bust.
And it's not a case where you have the ability to strike, because if you did, someone will just come along and take your job.
The market is trying to tell you something, you just need to listen to it.
The C++ guys working on the engine, sure. But they are a minority and the rest don’t have easily transferable skills.
once we end up with an equal number of
over supplied software engineers.
As an employer I want to be able to fire toxic or under-performing employees at will without jumping through a hundred hoops to make sure I am not breaking any union rules.
As an employee, I want to be free to negotiate my own wages based on my merit.
If there is one thing I would want a union to do it would be to collectively enforce some kind of profit sharing plan. The interests of the employees and the employer align -- make a great game that sells well. Anything else, no thanks.
> I run a very small indie game studio in Boulder, CO.
Even railroads and textile mills didn’t ask their employees to work 80 hour work weeks.
Where I've worked we valued work/life balance as much as possible. Did we have a bit of crunch close to a release? Yep, but it was short and a few weeks at max. Most of us enjoyed it due to the extra camaraderie.
If there were a unionization effort that focused on 1) a hard 40-50 hour cap on work hours (or with paid overtime) and 2) enforced profit sharing plans, I could support it.
The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
Literally every time I had a 3-4mo 80-100hour crunch it always started out with "we're going to push for a week or two" which just transitioned into "just one more week" for the next 3 months.
Also, shame for celebrating a crunch. You may have enjoyed it but there's a high likelyhood someone else went along just to not "rock the boat". I don't care who you are putting in more hours puts stress on other parts of your life.
I just don't understand how that industry has their head up their ass from top to bottom for such a long time. There's some interesting problems in that space but after my 6 years I'd never go back.
I worked for five years at early and late stage startups before transitioning to games, and I cannot recall there ever being a time when extra work was not needed to get over the finish line.
If a union ends up being the only way chronic overwork can be addressed in the industry at large, so be it. Perhaps the real solution though is a legislative one, as suggested below.
Fuck yeah it's "just work".
I want my employees and coworkers to be happy, healthy and well actualized so that when they're at work they're focused and giving it 100%. Plenty of hard business data there shows that when you make sure someone's time outside of work is well respected they'll perform much better on the job.
Burnout and turnover can have a brutal impact on an company/organization's ability to execute, the list goes on. You're also self-selecting for a workforce that has the flexibility, which means your viewpoint is a lot less diverse.
This is the same crunch bullshit I got fed before in that industry.
What if you were a single dad?
What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
I've found some of the best teams I was on had a diverse set of people who bring their unique perspectives into the fold. Otherwise you could end up with a racist soap dispenser[1].
> What if you were a single dad? > What if you had an elder family member to take care of?
As I mentioned above, family takes priority. If your team is so immature that they feel resentful when another member can't work those two extra hours a day because their Dad is sick, you've got another set of problems.
> What if you were living paycheck to paycheck and had a second job to be able to make rent?
This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry. If you need two jobs to make rent in this scenario, find a way to cut expenses.
I'll hazard that the answer is low, because the industry self-selects for people who are willing to take abuse for 'prestige'. They take pride in it, just the same way you did.
> This is a bit of a stretch. We are limiting the scope of our discussion to workers in the game industry.
Yes, yes we are. My first job in the industry was $35k/hr as a dev and I've seen worse salaries for design or art.
Let me pose a question to you. How would you live in Seattle, on $35k/yr in a way that one accident/major expense wouldn't put you in a situation where you're living paycheck to paycheck? Keep in mind an average 1br apartment is ~$1800/mo[1] so you're going to be well over 50% income : housing ratio.
For that reason you have people who work second jobs or have other commitments to be able to make their rent.
[1] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/wa/se...
And $35k for a dev job? When was this, and if it was anytime even remotely recent why on earth did you accept? A new QA hire at my last job would've made more than that.
You don't live in Seattle proper if you are making $35k. Live in a suburb on the line. Don't have a car payment if you can avoid it. And to pull that income : housing ratio down get roommates. I have done this.
And frankly this is a pretty silly argument to make in a discussion around why game developers should unionize.
I worked at such company too. It had zero to do with need for overtime and and a lot to do with people wanting to work this way. E.g. unwillingness to prioritize, unwillingness to negotiate, wish to be seen like the one who stays late and thus finding work to stay late when not needed. Overtime is not seen as failure of organization, so the organization does not learn how to do it. People staying late are seen as heros and people managing projects so that overtime is not needed are not rewarded, so latter leave and former create culture.
To large extend, people who stay in such companies don't believe it is possible to make deadline without overtime, so they are not even trying.
Show me any project with dynamic requirements that has some sort of deadline, be it time or money running out, and I guarantee there has been some extra work at some point.
Prioritization, negotiation and saying no. Estimates large enough that they have buffers. You don't need on hour predictability. It is precisely when you have dynamic requirements when you are supposed to use tools like that.
After crunch, there are typically many bugs and convoluted code. It just adds to overall time in long term. Pretty much all studies found crunch to not be effective. It is not about achieving more.
But crunch is normally defined as sustained overtime - articles I seen it require it to be over 6 weeks. So it is quite a lot of time.
If I wanted a predictable job that always has upfront hours, I suppose I could go back to making hourly minimum wage with zero benefits.
In my ~6 years in the industry I don't know of a single coworker in the entire Seattle area who didn't run into a project that underwent serious crunch. Sample size of ~400 people or so.
I've also got longtime friends who broke in separately from me(and worked on some high profile stuff) in the SF/Bay area that say the exact same thing.
>The current main unionization effort basically says "things will be better for everyone" on their FAQ. Total bullshit.
What is your familiarity with how a union works? An industry-wide unionization effort cannot effectively state what the future will hold.
When employees decide to try to organize a union within their company, they decide what the issues are. Their task is to convince their coworkers to join the union, so they will be focusing on the pain points unique to their own employment situation. Maybe in one company, it's crunch time, while in another, it's keeping a more consistent labor force despite project sizes changing wildly over time.
The new union will then negotiate a contract on behalf of its members. Each new union will be focusing on different things.
An industry-wide organizational effort that focuses on work hours and profit sharing would not catch the interest employees at a shop with good hours, good pay, but zero job protections and inadequate health coverage (for example).
What's to stop the same thing repeating itself in a game developers union?
At the same job, another employee, young apprentice, was found napping. He popped awake and was apologetic. Partied too hard the night before. The foreman sent him on a coffee run to get his head together. He wasn't fired, presumably because the foreman never reported him, and (at least for the rest of that job) it never happened again. Almost 20 years later, he still probably gets shit for it.
Bad employees can coast by in any job, especially hourly ones where the upper management is rarely onsite with the workforce. First dude got fired in short order despite the job protections. Second dude didn't, but (to my knowledge) not because of any union regs.
Anyway, I digress. There is, of course, nothing preventing some union horror story from taking place. There is also nothing preventing even worse labor exploitation from taking place (and we're already at 80+ hour weeks in some cases).
The biggest difference, though, is the labor market itself. The laborers in construction unions are temporary hires for a specific job. At the same time, most construction unions are craft unions with apprenticeships, where each new employee represents a risk/investment to training that person for many years. Nepotism abounds, because if you train a new hire for, say, two years, then they wash out of the program or leave to study engineering, they could have spent that time and energy training someone else.
By contrast, I would expect most gaming unions to look more like a public employees' union. It would represent permanent employees of a company, likely salaried. Not much would change in the hiring process outside contact negotiation. You get the job? Congrats, you can join the union.
[0] http://www.striking-women.org/module/workplace-issues-past-a...
[1] https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transforming...
You're management/executive at this point. It is obviously in your interest to be anti-union.
It is also the case that unions serve the interests of those who are not "rock star developers" more than those who are.
The current unionization efforts provide almost no details on their goals beyond "everything will be better for everyone". On either end of the employee/employer relationship I have a hard time seeing how anyone can support such a generic effort.
A hard stance on working conditions and compensation is a starting point for a real conversation. The majority of employees would have no problem supporting this, and since I already value work/life balance and fair compensation, my motives and interests would align.
I don't work in gaming though. I would love to, but the pay for business development is frankly better with a lot less stress. I wouldn't mind seeing a push legislating that any salaried worker in a week must be granted an extra paid day off at 45 hours and each 5 hours above in a single week. That would stop, or at least compensate, the abuse.
Addressing overwork at the legislative level would get my support if there were a way to trade pain now for benefit later (e.g. your extra time off suggestion).
Maybe unions can be useful after all!
The community theatre down the street doesn't require every performer to be an cardholding AEA member, and it wouldn't make financial sense for anyone involved (management, workers, or audiences) for that to change. The mere existence of a union doesn't necessarily change anything unless workers want it to change.
For big game dev companies that have repeatedly shown that they don't believe in treating people fairly, this would bring professional representation to the workers' side. Even if the details are light at this point, I don't see how you can be against that in principle. The employer/employee relationship is inherently asymmetric, and this attempts to correct for that.
If I were a small non-union indie shop and I was lucky enough that some highly talented AAA developer wanted to work with me, I would be unable to hire him if he's union unless I converted my entire shop over to be union. If I didn't, he would be in direct violation of his union contract and could be fined or lose his membership.
I understand that not every union functions the same, but it is not hard to imagine that wherever there is a lot of money at stake the union will do everything in it's power, to well, seize power.
Considering the movie industry is dwarfed by the video game industry from a revenue point of view, I can very easily imagine this scenario repeating itself.
I've never heard of unions working like this, this may be a US-specific thing. Unions are just workers right groups, if the company is big, the group is inside the company, if it's too small, you just apply to the local union. They help to negotiate better laws and benefits for the whole industry & also directly at a company level in big companies.
> It is also the case that unions serve the interests of those who are not "rock star developers" more than those who are.
I'm not convinced in the current market that those interests need serving to the detriment of the better devs. Were the employers in a more favorable position I could see a different view. But right now any half-way capable dev (i.e. not "rock star") has plenty of current advantages sans union.
How great did those rockstar employees do when google and other massive companies engaged in anti-poaching agreements to drive salaries down? How good do they do when they end up divorced and miserable after putting in yet another 2 months of 100 hour work weeks?
Unionization doesn't stop illegal collusion, prosecution stops illegal collusion. What is with all the appeal to emotion with divorced, miserable, 100 hour work weeks, etc? Most employees did just fine anyways. Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying "but tell that to the employee that was divorced, overworked, blah blah emotional language". At a macro level there are practical concerns.
You could make that same argument against the concept of defense lawyers. How would you feel if you had to defend yourself against criminal charges without a lawyer? Do you think justice would be served if you had to go it alone against a well-funded, experienced team of prosecutors who want to convict?
Yes, defense lawyers aren't perfect and can't stop all prosecutorial misconduct, but they still help a lot. Ditto with unions.
The anti-union propaganda did an amazing job at making most people think that all unions were like the corrupt Teamsters unions of NYC and Chicago, when most of them are nothing at all like that.
Most employees did just fine anyways.
Categorically false. Most employees did fine because unions negotiated the labor rules that led to those "fine" working conditions. Those conditions have worsened as unions have lost their leverage.
And unions have labor lawyers. Wouldn't it help the prosecution to add positions whose job would be to identify such issues, and which have visibility across employers?
Today, without a union, how would you as an individual ever know if companies are colluding against you and other workers? What would you do to cause this offense to be prosecuted?
> Every single job would get value out of a union if the justification is simply saying ...
I agree with this sentence, but I draw from it the opposite conclusion. I think most jobs would get value out of a union.
I don't understand your logic here. If something is desirable for everyone, then everyone should do it. We shouldn't assume it's not possible for everyone, and therefore conclude that it must not have been desirable in the first place.
What else can you imagine beyond compensation or job security that could be improved in the lot of a software developer? Maybe even some things could yield productivity benefits that management would like if they could see their way through it? And if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
> if some of these things are more likely with collective bargaining, why would you rule it out as a tool?
Because of all the negative externalities that happen to some employees and employers. If it was all upside there would be no reason. It's not ruled out as a tool, just its use in the current dev (general, maybe not game specific) market.
We shouldn't pretend that what a union wants is arbitrarily disjointed from the individual interests of its members, either.
Every collective has the potential to depart from individual preferences in some way. How much that happens varies in practice.
And it's pretty likely that your employment agreements are not an exception, even if you've arrived at them without any collective work on your side.
> Leaving at-will firings on the table for instance is unlikely to garner popular support.
This assumes the only incentive for joining a union is ultimate job security. That's a popular anti-union conception, but that doesn't make it correct. Any popular benefit that is not commonly conferred could provide a cohesion point for collective bargaining.
> I personally don't want specific severance requirements for those fired, otherwise you end up with defacto unfire-able situations because you've artificially increased the cost to remove a bad employee.
Increasing the cost of something is very different from making it defacto impossible. Though it is one way of providing an incentive against doing something arbitrarily. And it's not clear a negotiated price for firing would be any more "artificial" than any other negotiated price, up to and including your salary.
> I don't want to force them to run their company a certain way by rule, I'll just voice displeasure and leave if necessary.
That's pretty much how unions work. It just turns out to have more leverage if you multiply it by the size of the participating workforce.
> Due to the vast differences in employer packages and the freedom of choice given to the employee in the current demand-heavy market
Again, the freedom of individually negotiated compensation can co-exist with collective bargaining. A sibling comment even points out examples.
If they unionize, game developers are most likely to copy the union/guild format of Hollywood unions, which provide salary and health protections but otherwise let the members determine employment terms on their own (i.e., contracts for days, weeks, full projects, long-term, or open-ended are all acceptable).
You mean like.... an employer?
> As an employer
Ahh.
Two things wrong with this.
1) Professional unions, such as Hollywood and sports unions, do not establish rigid payscales like non-professional unions. They set a salary floor and some basic guidelines for non-salary pay (e.g. residuals are typically mandated). If game developers unionize, the union will likely be a professional union.
2) Salary negotiation is intensely problematic, and many companies are doing away with it, union or no. For example, Reddit a few years ago eliminated negotiation in favor of delivering their best offer from the start. Salary negotiation has sexist biases and rewards people for skills that A) have nothing to do with the skills that are required for the job and B) not everyone qualified for the job possesses. Salary negotiation is about enabling employers to pay employees lower salaries; it benefits the employer entirely and not the employee. And that goes back to pnathan's comment: the whole point of unions is to act in the interest of the employees against the employer, so the whole "as an employer" section is ultimately irrelevant.
No one want's to protect under-performers for whom they'd have to pick up the slack. And no one wants their compensation set arbitrarily. Especially since in software anyone can jump ship and find performance based compensation somewhere else.
They just want to work the hours specified in the employment contract rather than being singled out in isolation from each other and required to work far beyond the amount contractually agreed on under threat of termination.
So you'd just have a group that discuses abusive uncompensated overtime and request changes in a united way. Because a single person complaining or quitting over mistreatment has zero impact.
This is a really important point as trying to represent a bunch of people’s opinion based on a single, limited survey is not productive.
I don't know enough about statistics to say how big the error bars would be here, but I'm constantly astonished by how well statistical methods can work with even seemingly small samples.
The population of gamedevs who go to a conference is probably not a random selection of gamedevs in general.
The sample is almost certainly biased, we just don't necessarily know how much and in what direction.
https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case1.h...
It seems like you'd have to know how conference attendees differ from the population of game developers you're interested in.
In 2016 the national polls were very close to the final result--within a couple points. Remember that Clinton won the popular vote.
State polls were less accurate, but the general consensus is they were wrong due to undecided voters breaking more for Trump than is normal in the final few days--after the final state polls were conducted.
That being said, your point stands. Sample method is generally more important than sample size, and 4,000 game devs who self selected to attend a conference is very unlikely to be a representative sample.
It seems to me the GP comment meant that because it was a survey among people who attended GDC it's not representative. If that is why they questioned it, I'd say it's an even more relevant survey, as those are the people who care more about the industry and have more influence. No mater how you slice it, I'd say it's an indicator not to be ignored.
Last year, EA made over a billion dollars in profits. If they aren't using that money to improve the working conditions of developers, what makes you think the solution is to give them more money?
And that doesn't include any in-game transactions.
That's fairly disingenuous - the last game I bought at full price was Spiderman. A quick Google says the the average user on the default difficulty clears the story in about 20 hours.
Sper metroid came out in 1994 (25 years ago), and the same quick search says that most people will clear it in 8 hours or so.
Single player games today are also regularly putting out free balance patches (nioh), large free content updates(Gran Turismo) and smaller chunks of paid content that rival the size of other games for very reasonable amounts (Witcher 3).
Statistics show that most people never finish the games anyway (I certainly don't) so it's only fair that those people who must really play everything pay extra.
Suppose you have 1 Billion in fixed costs and 1$ in per unit cost and are given two options. The equation is just (number sold) * (unit price - unit costs) and that 1 Billion dollar fixed cost is irrelevant when maximizing profit (or minimizing loss).
What it would do is reduce the number of games created, as the industry becomes slightly less profitable. Which would then spread consumer spending over fewer titles and thus recuperate the burden of a union.
It's not a myth. It just depends on whether the pricing is demand driven or supply driven. Commodity products absolutely have their prices set by costs (labor among them).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOrKtZsoy30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL8HfoCzCB0
Both are thoughtfully argued and well worth watching.
Example of a modern non-American union where workers exert control to better the company over management decisions:
Many unions and guilds have codes of professional ethics. A quick google finds this example:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
But prices don't exist in a vacuum either. The gaming market has exploded and is vastly larger than it was back in 2006.
Steam found games were typically much more profitable when heavily discounted than when full price in general.
How much of content offered is sort of irrelevant. A better metric would be how many gamers buy these things. I'd guess quite a few since they keep going all in on the model (it's getting worse).
Black ops 4 had one for $40[1]. Can't seem to find historical info about civ6, but I know a "large expansion" was not included in the season pass.
[0]: https://ew.com/article/2016/02/17/fallout-4-season-pass-pric...
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/13/17447600/call-of-duty-blac...
I've seen that on Reddit as well, you think companies have a year worth of content and holding onto it ... The content is just not ready / created.
You also have a whole category of "basic" games (like phone games or indy games) that are nominally (unadjusted) cheaper than a retail NES game for the full version. I'm not an expert on this category by any means but I bought a few games from the Switch store that are very comparable to an NES game for $5-20. That's only a max of $9 in 1988 dollars!!
I'd agree that "consumer [un]friendly practices" are still a problem though. (could be a case of a few "whales" making large purchases on stuff like loot boxes subsidizing everyone else)
[1] http://videogamecomicads.blogspot.com/2012/12/sears-nintendo...
DISCLAIMER: I only play single player console games.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2018/05/08/electronic...
I suspect loot boxes decrease the price of a game to the median player. I suspect that in many cases, they've reduced the modal and often even median price to $0.
The probably also increase the mean price, though.
When it comes to AAA games (which is who is really exploiting their employees rather than indies) it sounds like you're picking someone at random, (e.g. "Today's your lucky day Shading Engineer #4, please accept this venmo.")
We all say we'll happily pay more for the same product. But those words often aren't backed up by actions.
General software development gets moved overseas and comes back all the time.
Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
The Witcher 3 was a pretty good game (Polish developers) - many would call that an understatement. The Uncharted series since 2 or 3 relied heavily on outsourced development (especially for art assets). Arma 3 was developed by Czech devs. These countries probably produce lower budget games on average, and don't have lots of existing infrastructure to leverage. But that makes what they have accomplished all the more impressive given what they were working with.
What makes you so confident in the class that developers in countries with lower costs of living are worse than ones in wealthy countries? Do you think that Polish or Bulgarian developers are on average worse than American ones, and it so do you have something to back up that claim?
General software development also isn't unionized. As soon is it is, moving overseas becomes vastly more attractive.
> Software development is hard. Pushing it to a cheaper third party usually increases costs a lot in the long term due to the increase is development complexity and generally a decrease in worker skill.
What's actually harder about outsourcing is management and quality control. The developers in cheaper countries aren't somehow inherently worse.
Many publishers have studios around the world, working on entire games by themselves. Why keep funding an expensive studio in the US that's getting unionized? That better be high caliber, which most studios aren't.
> A strong union can also prevent companies from moving some jobs overseas.
Maybe in a big monolithic company, but that's not how game publishers operate.
Developers who actually sleep and spend weekends with their families produce a better product than those who just accept dead marches. If managers are aware that they can not get away with those shenanigans it's possible that we'll actually get better games.
The point is, though, many people are willing to put up with that "bullshit" (which, judging by what you say later, mostly revolves around working hours contrary to what you write in this first paragraph). As much as we try to convince ourselves that crunch time and long hours don't work, plenty of studios demonstrate that is does. RDR2 is probably one of the best games of 2018 and it relied on crunch time. At the end of the day, a studio that can't demand crunch time is going to be at a disadvantage compared to those that can.
In an ideal world we'd all have well paying jobs in fields we love that offer good work life balance. But we don't live in the ideal world, we live in the real one. And many game developers are willing to make the sacrifice of long working hours.
What a lot of people don't realize is that unions can also cause wage suppression when they decide that more members working is better than fewer members working at higher pay.
I expect this trend to continue along the lines sketched out by the film industry: smaller core teams with specialized support studios/groups brought onto projects as needed and heavy use of contractors to scale staffing at different points of the project. This works in Hollywood in large part due to the union protections afforded to that temporary workforce, from actors to camera operators to screen writers.
As it stands now, video game development looks a lot like the (film) VFX industry and I think both are in an untenable place for long term sustainability. Something needs to change and I think organizations like SAG are a model for that.
I see lots of AAA games loaded down with unnecessary cruft that adds little value to the overall experience and it makes me sad to think a bunch of poor devs probably had to grind through crunch to add it.
I expect it’ll be a little from both columns.
Think of a first-person shooter. You can add the ability to upgrade weapons and armor (a system) and add a fishing minigame to provide resources for upgrades (a new mode of play).
Specifically, look at Just Cause 4. Your basic systems core to the gameplay are shooting things, the grappling hook, the parachute, the wingsuit, and vehicles. The unnecessary cruft is stuff like your ability to upgrade the grappling hook, the deployment of squads to capture territory, and supply drops.
My impression is that AAA studios aren't stupid... they know that these extra systems and modes don't contribute much to the game. But they do contribute to customer's evaluation of whether the game is worth spending $60, and this contribute's to the bottom line. This is the same reason why manufacturers pack needless features into a product and skimp on core functionality. People are more likely to shop on the basis of feature lists than on the quality of core functionality.
This is why I'm skeptical... the unnecessary cruft is there because it drives purchasing decisions, so it's not going away unless you change the way people purchase games.
I think Ubisoft games are the worst at this. Tons of experimental or different game elements that don't contribute to the core game. You can play chess or other board games in the middle of Assassin's Creed III. It does nothing. They had this whole city-building subgame that added nothing. They had an inchoate pirate game in there that was actually engaging enough that they made an entire sequel centered on it, but it added nothing to the actual ACIII game itself.
I can see evidence of all sort of "wouldn't it be cool if. . ." features that really don't need to be there and I can't help but think that if PMs actually had to think through what they're trying to do with their game they wouldn't do this as much. Bioware actually admitted to this after Mass Effect 3, claiming that they had never managed with so many resources at hand before and they couldn't really resist the impulse to bite off more than they can chew. This led to them adding in a bunch of extraneous side-quests and stuff that they didn't really get a chance to put enough time in to do it justice or make it worth anyone's while.
The unfortunate side-effect is that smaller studios often charge much less for their titles than what they should in an effort to please customers who are conditioned to pay very little, and then can't make up for price in volume.
It's true. A lot of people complain about $60, but that's significantly cheaper than what NES games cost back in their heyday (adjusted for inflation).
And just look at not just team size and effort (probably 50-100x comparing modern AAA games to NES titles), but amount of content: most NES games used difficulty to pad out their length greatly; a gamer who's reasonably skilled at, say, Contra, can beat it in like 30-60 minutes. In comparison, a game these days with a 6 hour campaign is thought of as pretty short, and usually they have other content other than campaign: challenge modes, multiplayer, minigames, etc.
But if you're there to chase teenagers for their parent's money, or even just the lowest common denominator of gamer, you'll probably have a bad time. Those customers want very long campaigns, AAA graphics and as low of a price point as possible.
Why should I go through the extra effort, financial loss, etc. Typically to help support engineers less productive than I to keep their jobs? No thanks.
Although, we just took on an intern who absolutely kicks ass, and runs circles around people who've been doing it for 10 years. That kid makes me nervous lol.
It's at least partially because it's so many programmers' "dream job." So many people get into programming because of their interest in games, then take jobs in the industry. They then are willing to tolerate/justify worse working conditions because they are doing something they are passionate about and the company culture has evolved to exploit that.
Theory: Because people like developing games, the industry has gotten used to overworking workers and replacing them with fresh meat once they burn out. There's more than enough replacements eager to work on games.
Workers have more power now due to the red-hot tech job market. This will not be true forever.
On the other hand, I've never seen a deserving and talented software engineer out of a job for very long. And if you're talented you will get paid much much more than average.
The only software engineers that want or need a union are the ones that need artificial barriers to keep them employed.
These dues can be very significant if you factor in the pay you lose as an above average employee, when you can no longer negotiate your own salary.
Unions are not a good thing for everyone in a highly competitive market with big differences in employee performance.
Maybe. Ask all those immigrant workers.
> unlimited vacation(s).
lol. rhetorical b/s.
But I'll note that even engineers who are less productive than you deserve stability and some level of control over their work lives.
So maybe consider it part of your moral imperative as a "winner" in the current economic environment to make sure other people can taste the benefits you enjoy -- even if you have deemed them "less productive."
At whose cost? Do developers even less productive than that next tier deserve stability? Does the worst employee deserve stability?
All those protections have a cost borne by someone.
Yes.
They don't deserve the best jobs at the fanciest companies, of course, but every single human being alive deserves stability. That's the baseline. If we as a civilization cannot provide that, then we need to keep working at it.
If that is your goal, software developers in western nations should be the least of your worries.
The ones who are not productive are usually the ones that interfere with my ability to be productive.
I'm an engineer and in general if I want to work in the game industry I will end up taking a salary that is significantly less than I would if I joined any non-game tech company.
Case in point, I've worked with someone at a game company that compared to the rest of the industry treats its employees very well. He was making at most $110k a year as a lead senior engineer (not including bonuses). He left the game industry and joined a well known soon-to-IPO startup as a senior engineer. He is now making $175k base with additional bonuses and stock options.
I'm not complaining, but trust me, the game industry is a different beast. It's much worse if you aren't an engineer -- artists, designers and QA are often treated as disposable.
You can, and the company can choose to not hire you. There is a huge power imbalance between employers and employees. Right now, this is muted because the job market is so tight. This will not be true forever.
> Just because it's something you personally find advantageous doesn't mean others feel the same way, and no one should ever be forced into it.
As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
Of course we do. Doesn't make it a good idea all the time.
I noticed you've emphasized this twice. You have to admit that this pro-active idea of "join a union before you _really_ need the union" is not that compelling of a sales pitch to a lot of developers who already have good paying jobs. It's human nature.
>I never understand employees who don't want to unionize.
Do you really want to understand? I think the reasons are obvious: most programmers don't see any economic benefits to paying ~$500 (or whatever amount) annual union dues for very little gain.
If you can prove to developers that paying $X would return tangible benefits in excess of those fees, there would be an unstoppable movement. The proof isn't there yet.
As many programmers have testified, they already get excellent pay, benefits, work hours, etc without union representation. Yes, of course some programmers are suffering in terrible jobs but not enough of them (yet) outnumber the people who don't want to pay for a union.
I can easily understand why some programmers want a union. But it's a mystery why union supporters also can't see why some don't want it.
Join a union so your kid doesn't have to direly need a union.
If you don't have kids, substitute an imaginary version of you who's growing up and falling in love with the same craft you did, except right now.
One example - teachers. In the public sector, teachers are unionized yet underpaid, and in general terms, have unfavorable work conditions.
In the private sector, teachers get paid much better and have the freedom to actually run their classroom in the way they see fit.
The union isn't the cause of this disparity, but it clearly doesn't overcome it.
While this might be true wherever you are from, it is definitely not universal. Every US state I have lived in has been the opposite.
At a private school, the advantages to teachers are the student base is self-selected and can be expelled, and the school can teach things a public school cannot (often religious).
At a public school, pay, benefits, and job protections are much better.
Being able to "run your classroom the way they see fit" is a school-by-school work culture thing, but a teacher with more job protections would always have more leeway in how they ran their classroom. A teacher working at-will could never truly run their classroom the way they saw fit, because "do X or you're fired" is always a possible ultimatum.
Ideally the government should have worker protections in place that do exactly what a union does.
Of course in reality you need groups to represent the workers to put pressure on the government to do that. But I'd rather give money to groups like the EFF who specifically push policy and lawsuits over a group like a union.
Should Software Engineers want to remain a part of the professional class over the long term, it would be ignorant to not push for these things and introduce further supply restrictions around who can and cannot be a software engineer just as how accountants, lawyers, actuaries, ect have all done before them.
This is funny for me to read, because you probably intended to imply that's a bad thing. I'd also question whether the forms of domination which the founders of the unions of old has decreased or just changed form - and even given that it has decreased, what is an acceptable level of exploitation? I would say none, and many union members would agree with that supposition.
Today not being that bad means that today is still bad.
It's a trade, one person trades their time, knowledge effort and skill, the other trades money and other compensation. As I said, I'm not even anti union. I would rather see a guild around software development over a union though, based on reputation over protecting the bad performers. It could be considered A union, but wouldn't act like a typical union in practice.
If you are more senior, and submit that a junior is ready to move into a journeyman role, your reputation is also at least partially on the line if they cannot do the work, or put in the effort to get there.
No person's wants should ever infringe on another's rights.
Some theorists define exploitation in capitalist society as unequal exchange of labour, see John Roemer for instance; other more traditional critiques see it similarly but it may apply individually (such as Marx's theory), and yet others see it as a class issue. Of these, they can be grouped into PECP (Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle) and CECP (Class-exploitation Correspondence Principle). There's a lot of talk and debate as to whether which of these, if any, is a viable or possible way to characterize modern relations of production.
>It's a trade, one person trades their time, knowledge effort and skill, the other trades money and other compensation.
In the employment relationship, this trade is assymetrical, hence the need for either strong labour laws, a rich union culture or both.
>No person's wants should ever infringe on another's rights.
The critique of capitalism begins with a critique of rights-based thinking. In short, some people don't believe that rights are a useful tool to characterise how society ought to look, since it is clear that despite universal rights, some are clearly more able to take advantage of them than others. The propertyless have right to property. So what? Where does that get them most of the time?
This is an assumption, and a logical fallacy. The whole problem of doing something "for the greater good" is that no one on Earth can definitively define what is good and what is not. Trying to do so is the bottomless rabbit hole we call ethics. OP is correctly pointing out that your view of unionizing being advantageous is subjective.
This is simply moral relativism. That argument holds up only under specific, ad-hoc circumstances. A group of people can very easily come to a conclusion that an action should be taken because they agree on it, and find out later that the consequences of that action were detrimental.
If a group of people collectively make a decision that is not consistent with evidence and their ethical system, then they are not making decisions correctly. I don't think anyone here is debating that decisions can be incorrect.
No it's not. The poster was seemingly espousing a belief that because he didn't want a union, it is morally wrong to force one on him. That is inconsistent with a belief in the benefits that government coercion can sometimes be a good idea. A union could conceivably be a bad thing or a good thing, but to dismiss it with a rights-based argument simply doesn't make sense.
> The whole problem of doing something "for the greater good" is that no one on Earth can definitively define what is good and what is not.
All endeavors may fail. We make decisions based on probability of outcomes. This is the same for both individual and collective decisions. If we cannot make collective decisions under uncertainty, then there is no point to any government whatsoever. Also, if we cannot come up with a baseline of ethics to evaluate possible outcomes, then we can't make any collective decision either.
> A union could conceivably be a bad thing or a good thing
> As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
You are contradicting yourself. If a union could be a good or a bad thing, then one cannot use the argument that we do things for the greater good without presupposing that a union is a good thing. You are indeed assuming your own premise as true, which is indeed a logical fallacy.
There are historical arguments for and against particular unions for particular people, and there are studies of the impact of union activity.
"That's subjective" is the start of a debate, not the end of it.
No I'm not. In these comments I am arguing against the premise that a closed shop union is automatically invalid because the coercion would be wrong. The advantages that a union can have is not subjective under pretty much any reasonable ethical framework. If your ethical system can not produce judgments about public policy based on evidence, then it is useless.
Subjectivity is a different thing from uncertainty. The goal of ethical systems is to provide a way to make ethical decisions based on evidence. If we can agree on some ethical concepts, then objective decisions can be made given those concepts. The selection of an ethical system is subjective, but it's pretty obvious that it must allow for coercion.
Is it hard to see why an individual might be against that?
> Is it hard to see why an individual might be against that?
It's not hard to see, but individuals who prioritize their own desires over the greater good of their community are often (rightly) regarded as selfish. It is hard to have much empathy for someone who has their selfishness thwarted.
I think a lot of people would be better off with a union, though really I more advocate cooperatives.
I'm represented by a union at my job and I also negotiate these things myself (well, the union has a bargain for minimum working conditions, so I can't say "if you pay me $1000 I'll move my desk to the HVAC room"). The union comes into play more for things like health insurance and retirement benefits. I can't imagine an individual having much luck getting their insurance copays reduced, but the union seems to have a decent amount of success.
Turns out, you do need someone to do that for you, in fact you're almost always in better shape if you do get an advocate.
Having a collective agent is almost the polar opposite.
Things like retirement and health benefits are not negotiated at the individual level. having a personal representative likely wouldn’t help much in that area, but a union would.
In the event that your personal agent is negotiating for you personally, but also for several teammates, of course there is then a conflict and your interests may be traded for the interests of another one of his clients, which is an issue.
This is still better than having your interests pooled together, but not as good as having ONLY your interests advocated for.
It's not objectively better to negotiate by yourself, stop pretending like it is.
Unions represent... the union.
The labor movement is in a sorry state because unions live longer than their useful period.
There are spots where unions remain useful... but those are few and far between.
Have you been aware that real wages have not been rising with productivity since the 70's? Inequality has also risen massively. You may be in a comfortable position in your job, but a very large proportion employed people in the US are not financially secure.
Folks forget now, but the existence of a large middle class in the US is due to reforms pushed by the labor movement in the first half of the 20th century.
On one hand, it's great the labor movement pushed for reforms in the first half of the 20th century. But we're in the first half of the 21st century now and as you point out, real wages haven't kept up with productivity and lots of people are financially insecure. So has the labor movement been slacking for the past ~50 years?
Of course, there's a whole lot more to financial insecurity than labor compensation, but you seem to be arguing for unions being one part of the answer to that. But we have unions, so where's the disconnect?
Exactly the opposite. Unions started forming after WW2 which is when the middle class began its decline.
People being "not financially secure" doesn't mean that a Union represents their needs. Those are two separate - if related - issues.
"folks forget now" you seem to be ignoring one of my main points: Many Unions out live their usefulness.
There are points where Unions are great - and some of those points do exist today. I think Unions are important with regards to government agencies, for example - because the "employer" is massively disconnected from the lower level employees and in many aspects not accountable.
But the vast majority of Unions get created... maybe full-fill a purpose... then continues to exist as a detriment. A bureaucracy that exists unto itself and stops representing the worker and instead becomes another detached entity that's, for all intents and purposes, a net negative and a drain on a company.
IE: The auto industry.
You show me a union that factors in their base and covers the entire spectrum - and not 100% one party or political ideology... and we can begin talking about how a Union could or would represent all it's members...
My union has done nothing perceptible during the course of my employment, outside of protecting employees who are under performing.
My union dues cost 1% of my salary, and my perception is that they're taking that money and spending it on protecting bad employees.
I have friends who are higher up in unions at other workplaces, as well as friends who are involved with labor law. The impression all around is that my union and its representatives are "not good".
Unions don't automatically make working conditions better. They need to have good people working in the union to achieve that.
True. Unfortunately, many unions are incredibly milquetoast. However, even in such cases the union can still function as sort of an insurance policy against future severe abuses. Folks can also engage with their union: they will listen to workers.
Uh, the same group dynamics that cause cliques to form and higher powers within bureaucracies also can happen in unions. This happens regularly, and I've been a part of one, where regular workers were not listened to but the upper "management" of the union (can't use that word though) controlled the fates of everyone below.
You needed regular workers to rebel against the union to even get representation against management. All the while they collect dues.
Plenty of unions are good. But acting like all of them are, or why you can't understand why everyone wouldn't want to unionize, is really naive.
You derive 100% of your income from your employer. Your employer derives ~0.01%-1% of their income from you.
You derive 100% of your income from your union membership, which is a mandatory term of your employment. Your union derives ~0.01%-1% of their income from you.
(It actually derives even less than that, because it operates as a syndicate representing workers across multiple employers).
Almost every modern union is the textbook definition of controlled opposition.
The only escape is likely violent revolution of the anarcho-capitalist or anarcho-communist variety, these systems still share the problem of rich and powerful people with guns.
Now, there may be more than one equal among the top corporate leadership, and there might be more than one equal in the top union leadership. So, instead of having to have N unions, you could have N/m where m is the number of voting equals at the top of each level of the hierarchy.
This is not entirely facetious, many democratic countries essentially work like this. For example, Americans have a county legislature, a state legislature, and a federal legislature, and to some extent (a greater extent early in the country's history), they perform this sort of nested bargaining.
Except by the union.
I see it everywhere, this weird argument that "shitty unions are shitty." Well, yes. "Shitty [anything] is shitty."
Unions are a tool. That tool can be misused! But it can also be used well for great effect.
Sorry your union isn't working well for you.
Deauthorization of a union is much more difficult than forming a union in the first place. It is very difficult to obtain sufficient support for deauthorization without the union leadership hearing about it, at which point they can usually find sufficient reason to expel the member from the union. If there is an exclusive contract with the employer (which is usually the case in the US), this may result in the employee's termination.
Even if there is enough support for deauthorization to require an election, the NLRB has the authority to overturn the results of the election, and it has historically wielded this power quite generously in favor of the union.
I posit that if the market of the labor you're offering isn't very advantageous to you anymore, and if you're being mistreated by an employer when you're in a position where you can't use your financial means or time to fight back for whatever reasons, you will feel the need of someone else to fight for you because you can't just find an employer that will shower you with money two blocks away. And when I say "mistreated" I mean that everything you are entitled to in your contract is not something you can count on, so no severance, and when I say you're not in a financial position to fight back I mean that you don't have the means or the time to sue, even if you're 100% in the clear legally.
If you believe that will never happen, you're likely correct. I don't think my apartment will be on fire without me noticing too, it's a very low risk of that ever happening in my life, but I still want a smoke detector. I just can't take the risk. Same thing with union membership for me, I can't take the risk of being treated the same way my ex-wife was treated when she was simultaneously struggling with depression (and wouldn't have gotten anything she was entitled to from her employer during her medical leave if someone else hadn't fought for her).
That is incorrect, in the US if my workplace decides to unionize I'm forced to pay union dues. I am fully in my right to criticize unions as they can be foisted upon me without my consent.
However, unions here in the US have done untold amounts of lobbying to government and employers to make them mandatory. The argument is usually that, "if membership is voluntary, some people will forgo membership but still reap the benefits of our negotiations, therefore you must force them to join us." Considering that many politicians (particularly in rust belt states) win office by getting big union endorsements, this tactic works very well.
I would be likely to join a union that was voluntary, because if the leadership started doing things I disagreed with, I could quit the union, or join a competing union that was more in line with my beliefs.
This would require that the AFL-CIO, UAW, Teamsters, SEIU, etc. all reverse decades of their own established policy not to pursue members-only unions.
It would also require legislation that makes it possible for a worker to dissociate from a union that they don't want to represent them. There is immense opposition by labor organizers against anything remotely resembling this shape of law, so it is unlikely to happen.
Yes, but you want to take on both organized labor (AFL-CIO and the like) and anti-labor forces at the same time... well, good luck to you.
I mean that earnestly, not sarcastically. "Uphill battle" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Both entrenched unions and corporate interests support the status quo. It strengthens strong unions but makes organizing new unions harder.
As I've explained above, this is true but misleading. They are required to represent all workers in a bargaining unit, but they can define the bargaining unit however they wish, including defining the bargaining unit to encompass only workers who have decided to sign up for the union and pay their dues. The only thing they cannot do is create contracts which apply to non-members and refuse to represent those non-members.
> Mandatory membership is illegal.
This is a common misconception. Closed shops are illegal, but it is legal for an employer to require (pursuant to a union contract) that employees join the union within 30 days or risk being fired (excluding railway, airline, and government employees).
Unions can also expel members from their union, and if they have an exclusive contract with the employer, this may result in the employer being forced to fire the employee in question, depending on the reason for which they are expelled.
This statement is misleading to the point of it being a lie.
It is perfectly legal for a union to define the "bargaining unit" as "people who join this origanization".
Unions don't want to do this though. They instead want to force everyone to join.
Members only unions are explicitly in the National Labor Relations Act.
Well, obviously. They can make whatever negotiations that they want for their own benefits.
What they cannot do is negotiate for other people who have chosen to not join the union, which is what the word "exclusive" implies.
So yes, they can negotiate. For themselves. Not for other people. Which makes sense, why the heck should they have the right to negotiate a contract for people that they don't represent?
The can absolutely negotiate for themselves, though. Just like you and I can negotiate a contract for ourselves.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/i...
I am absolutely in favor of voluntary organizations. Just don't make it illegal for me to work at a job while refusing to join one.
This is true but misleading. Unions can define their bargaining unit as they choose. It is perfectly legal for a union to decide that its bargaining unit consists only of members (ie, people who have signed up for the union and have paid dues to it). That is exactly how unions work in almost every other OECD country, and which is why employees in countries like Germany, the UK, or France often have the choice of which union they want to represent them at their current job (or the choice not to be represented by a third party at all).
In the US, the main labor union syndicates (AFL-CIO, UAW, Teamsters, etc.) have all decided not to pursue this, instead only forming unions when they can get enough support to unionize all employees in a given class.
> You can choose not to pay anything in most states.
Technically true (27 of 50 states), but the main hubs for tech workers are basically all in states where this is not true (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, Illinois, etc).
Why all the hostility? If there are changes at your employer that you don't agree with, like unionization, just quit and take a different job. There's approximately zero unionization in the software development field right now, so you'll have tons of choices. No one's going to force you to stay in a union job if you don't want to.
Organized labor has introduced customs that you benefit from and take for granted.
All you have to do is look at the difference in quality of life that came before and after the changes we obtained from organized labor in the 1800s/early 1900s.
Most people don't appreciate the extreme asymmetry between those who control capital and those who create the wealth of nations (26 individuals have the same worth as 3.5 Billion individuals)
In fact, just look at the quality of life of a worker in a place with strong labor (say most of the EU) vs say, the US.
My wife is from the UK, I've looked into things there. I make 4 times what I would make in the UK, and that's before the additional taxes I'd pay (and before you ask the additional taxes for the NHS exceeds my spend for health insurance + copays). Sure they get about two weeks more vacation but I wouldn't trade that for 3/4ths of my salary why should I be forced to do so?
Also the UK is not a good example of a place with strong labor. It's much closer to the US. Look at quality of life in places like Germany or Austria.
A simple payscale.com comparison (not vouching for the data, it's just the first hit on google)
Average Software Engineer Salary
UK: £34,981 ($44908 USD) [0]
US: $83,483 [1]
The median salary is roughly double, if you are an outlier that number grows to about 4 fold.
[0]https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Software_Engineer/S... [1]https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S...
I put up with it because it's a 'take it or leave' it condition of getting a paycheck.
Yes, but some things have structural properties that lead to shittiness. Some would argue that unions have this property.
You can be as clever as you like but all systems are exploitable.
Your general attitude sounds defeatist and strange on a community that is all about improving from past mistakes and learning to build better systems by breaking existing ones.
There are shitty unions, but there are also shitty companies and you only have the right to affect one. If people say shitty things, should you abandon free speech or should you engage in the free speech you believe in? Most people would say the latter because they think free speech is an important right. I guess a similar conclusion would be that worker participation is too important to be left to shitty unions.
And may be even impossible depending on the people under its governance.
But I'll stick with my point. Creating an union right now is not completely safe, so there are reasons to be wary of people proposing them, and to debate the details. There is even reason to not create one if the details are not right.
Management doesn't pursue these people because of the effort involved with dealing with the union.
I'm open to a system that allows all of these things to happen.
However - applying that system on a micro scale (one workplace at a time, through unions) introduces way too much friction between employers and their employees, employees and their peers, and employers and unions.
It also causes an internal conflict for the employee - where they have to mask their lack of contribution by busywork, ultimately feeling unfulfilled in their life.
Unionizing all workplaces is a sub-optimal means to distribute wealth.
Of course Arizona itself has a weird kind of reverse union of hospitals that covers nursing that afaik hasn't been challenged yet, which seems like it would be either a right to work or trust violation. Can't speak to a broader sense.
Even under right-to-work laws, the employees can still be required to be covered under the union contract. Right-to-work laws just mean that the union can't forcibly withhold or charge dues from people who aren't union members.
It's a similar reason to why you still have to pay taxes even if you don't want to become a citizen.
Unfortunately I don't think I can share the details here.
Let's say gamedevs unionize. What prevents EA from moving their studios to Poland or China?
Culture, for one thing. Especially game series like Fallout or GTA live from the absurd amount of US-centric cultural references in even the tiniest details.
Sure, we've all heard the anecdotes of a union protecting some guy who probably wasn't competent or cut out for the job. But how do you like your weekends? Benefits? Work/life balance? It's not perfect, but those things would gradually erode away without unions to fight for and defend them. Don't think companies will preserve that forever just out of the goodness of their hearts. Don't think it's just a permanent, inviolate fixture of our culture now. It's a hard-earned way of life that our ancestors carved out for us.
Actually, those things are gradually eroding away this very moment, because unions are now terribly weak and most Americans have internalized this contrived hatred of organized labor. It's not going to go well for workers in the future if we're so complacent. Make no mistake, you and I both enjoy the fruits of bitter and intense union battles from previous generations. They may seem unnecessary relics of the past now, but without them we'd be back in tenement housing working 16 hour days and making barely enough money to afford rent and food from the company store very quickly. Lots of industries are already pushing us back to that state. Be grateful your career has a union. It's definitely well worth one percent of your salary.
If the union is successfully scaring the management from pulling any shenanigans on the good workers, then, they have a lot more free time for the borderline cases.
As for moral character: let me introduce you to the average person in management at a large corporation!
Unions may not always do the right thing. And there are lots of cases out there where unions have too much power or abuse that power. And sometimes you have an annoying co-worker who is so zealous about taking cases to the union that they seem to be in an extractive relationship with the company.
But that just means that unions are another human institution. Apparently the nearly-infinite number of cases where management abuses their power doesn't count? Where management is in an extractive relationship with the company?
If you want negotiating power over certain issues, for many kinds of workers or concerns, unions are the only game in town.
Every person I know in a union talks trash about their union like they talk trash about their family. The union will annoy them on a daily basis -- and then they'll remind you that it's all between friends, and everything is far better than back before they had representation.
It's not a reason to add another bureaucracy on top of the existing one we all hate either.
I've been represented by a union and their representation was wholly disadvantageous to me to a significant monetary amount as a result of their 'screw the new guy' policies and priorities. To wit, things would have been far better for me without them.
You need to be a part of a terrible union to understand why people would think that way. It's pretty simple once you've been in one that siphons off dues and does very little to combat management, of which there are many groups that will do this.
In relation to tech jobs, as I understand it union sign-up rates are quite low and that may be a function of the pretty decent wages the median tech worker makes. On the other hand I was listening to the news today and in my country they are experimenting with the idea of turning certain tech roles into trades and they say that the large tech companies might go for it. Not everyone is suited to 3rd-level ed. at the age of 18 and some learners are way more practical than theoretical oriented. If you could learn on the job and earn small wages while you're at it rather than racking up massive student loan debt that'd be super. Even better if you joined a tech union right out of the gate.
Also simply stating the thing someone says and saying it's a canard will convince no one.
Person 1: makes argument
Person 2: "Ugh this canard again?!"
Person 1: Uh yes. Nice talking to you.
I have dismissed it as a canard because this argument of "well if they don't like working there they can leave" has been done to death on HN, usually on threads about bad working conditions, at places like Amazon warehouses or on video game QA teams. And I point you to those places for my arguments against yours, because they've been repeated again and again. People often can't leave their job because of personal circumstances. They need the money. They need the health insurance. They have lack the resources to find another job quickly. They have families to feed. And sure, you'll rebut with "well they just have to suck it up and deal with it, and they must be sucking up and dealing with it if they haven't left." Which is correct to a point but is this an optimal result? Do we want a society where people are forced to stay at jobs they hate, that actively harm their mental if not physical selves, because of a resource distribution? When we produce enough to ensure that everyone can have a better standard of living? Which is the second, you could say, prescriptive, part of the argument. But the point is that the first argument has been debated before and I choose to dismiss it because we would be rebashing a very dead horse.
Just a personal view-point. I don't have direct union experience other that what I read about. Teachers union/nurses union/workers union typically going on strike every few years to get a cost-of-living increase in wages. Unions of tradespeople seem to be better though, but it still seems like salaries are constrained in those areas.
For anyone who thinks that they have a strong bargaining position, or enjoy great perks: Try asking for an escape from the open-office-floor-plan-hell, by getting your own office. You'll quickly see exactly how valued your special snowflake concerns are to the company.
I see unions as a way to protect employees from being unfairly taken advantage of (long hours without commensurate benefits and choice on your part, dangerous working conditions, bad salaries/wages). A bad office design is a bad office design and you need to convince your company that it's not in their best interests by other means or work elsewhere. Using a union to deal with all this will only end up in causing bad-blood all around. For certain things legislation is better -- you can blame the "government" boogeyman instead of being pissed with each other.
There is a minimal amount of employees, I think around 30, where there is legal support for the workers to organize and request the presence of the union in the company.
Usually it requires a voting process for everyone to decide if they are willing to adopt one or not.
One of the unions that represents IT is IG Metal.
Maybe what I am asking is -- does having unions constrain pay-hikes in any way?
I managed to get pay raises, while other friends of mine had their salary frozen.
I guess the situation might be different across the industry, a fellow German HNer might provide a better picture.
Ok that's not entirely true, I get that unions can help guide a one-shot prisoner's dilemma to cooperate-cooperate. But those are increasingly rare in a broad economy. My main objection is that I don't want to be part of a group that claims to "represent me", if I want a representative I'll appoint one myself. My secondary objection is that I don't want to be entangled in a legal structure where people far away can determine that because of such-and-such the union is going on strike and I'm not allowed to perform my job even if I want to. My third objection is for software related fields specifically, that a union will raise the barrier to entry, which so far has been kept incredibly low for the betterment of many people who came up from lower-middle class or lower and has allowed the field to expand to meet supply and across a pretty distributed set of locations.
As much as I prefer not to have government involved in much of anything, it's far simpler and far easier to legislate than to attempt to unionize. Unions tend to under-serve their average and above average members and is often not worth it. In the end, most would be happy to be compensated for personal expense and mandated overtime.
The biggest issue is generally a side effect of compensation. If the level of compensation after 40 hours exceeds the benefit to the company (reduced time to completion) they will pay or not. When it's effectively free, they will push. When less than half are willing, you won't get movement to/from a union.
There are also already lots of laws regarding payment to non-management, blue collar mostly hourly emloyees. Programmers are an exception, more so if salaried. There could probably be enough support to reduce the exceptions so programmers and IT in general are covered.
Any sufficiently complex system will over time inevitably develop goals of its own, unrelated to the system’s announced goals.
Since becoming a software developer, my life has been great and I have never needed a union's help. My TC is well over $400,000/year and after everything I've seen in my previous industry, I never would have reached that with a union.
Aside from not wanting to be part of a union, people are reluctant to join a union if others do not do the same. Many people might actually join one if there was a big one, but a big one can't grow because nobody wants to be the first guy to raise his hand.
So someone needs to make a website that manages this. Everyone pays a deposit, say $100 bucks, and signs onto some secure site that will keep details private. If you get more than some minimum, the money is sent to the new union. Otherwise send it back.
But whatever the mechanism there's more than enough programmers who ought to be motivated to do this.
I haven't worked in regular software in ages and have no intention of every going back to that. A single game will have multiple areas in which you have fun, interesting and challenging problems to solve. You don't typically get that in a vanilla software job. Of course, if you work for a large game company, they tend to have specialists for various areas and I would guess the job gets old in one of those places pretty quickly.
In my experience, the ones who really get exploited in the game industry are non-programmers. There are plenty of young people who want to work on games but not be programmers. They are frequently tracked into QA, game design or producer (known as program manager elsewhere) careers. There's an oversupply of these kids and along with artists they are the most egregiously underpaid. The best among them do go on eventually to be game designers (or upper management if they so desire) and do well.
If you want to be treated well, then stop flocking to people and places that treat you like crap.
Even if the only thing a union did was stop the exempt status for developers with regard to wage law we'd see a huge quality of life increase without much of a real impact on worker output.
(And by 'animated' I include pretty much every effects-laden action film. IIRC there is not currently an effects worker union in Hollywood, while there is an animators union - guess which craft sucks less to be in?)
Problem is there's a thousand young devs out there trying to bang down the doors to get in. In that situation I don't see how you have effective leverage.
With things as it stands today there's a good ~50-60% churn in the industry and things seem to keep rolling on(although I wonder what improvements we'd see with better working hours and improved pay WRT other dev domains).
The same could be said of acting and professional athletics, and actors and pro athletes have strong, effective unions. So this hurdle is not insurmountable.
Absolutely false. MLBPA is a joke and NFLPA stands idle while its employees are killed and subjected to brain damage while ineffectively signing agreements that discharge liability by management.
How about promoting software companies being run as co-ops, where all workers have more ownership and are self-managed?
That's a fantastic idea. In all honesty, unions are merely a mitigation for some of the worker-hostile aspects of the division between owners and workers. That split is also seems like it's the root cause of a lot of pathological union practices. I don't think you'd have those problems if businesses were worker-owned or if a worker union had a significant ownership stake.
Teachers unions, pilots unions, etc, generally agree on wage (usually some % increase per year of experience), and doctors which are harder to agree on wage because there is much more variation instead unionize with barriers to entry (stricter AMA requirements).
I wonder which would be better for game developers. Barriers to entry or agreed wages.
You're exchanging one set of overlords for another. Literally sit down with anyone in their first 8-15 years of experience in a union and ask them what kind of influence they have on their industry, what sort of choices of work they get to work, who gets "the jobs" before you do, and about their fixed pay scale, and what are the consequences if they take non-union jobs.
You'll find I think that most game developers would be willing to be paid pennies to be a part of the next big video game. And if that's the market you're trying to compete in, maybe you should be in a different market if you're worried about wages.
Its the same story but unlike game developers they get into that grind very often too. I don't think this scenario is unique to game developers alone and it exists in other domains - most prevalent when artistic expectation gets mingled with technology.
I've read that it would increase their protection (legal, and sometimes financial, I suppose?), and that it's supposed to improve working conditions (because unionized workers will have a more solid foundation to push against as they demand those conditions).
How deep does this go? Is there any other benefit? Something specific to the industry, perhaps?
I can't really think of anything else.
https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full-report...
You rarely get more money if you don't or can't demand it, e.g. salary negotiation.
It's easier to have low inequality when everyone is poor. It's harder to keep inequality low when people as a whole, including median, get richer. It's also harder to keep inequality (say, by Gini) for larger populations. (As neat evidence of this last fact, 45 US States last I checked had Gini below the aggregate US Gini - it's how the math works, hiding nuances).
For example, from your graphs: US median wage is higher than Western Europe (very few countries higher, most decently lower) - so they have lower inequality, but the people have less income.
Working hours are longer [0].
Capitalism did not give you a weekend. Capitalism did not give you a workday that ends after 8 hours. These are things that people literally died for. Business owners hired Pinkerton thugs to murder workers, to try to get them to fall in line. Never say that capitalists gave people leisure time and benefits. My grandfather stood in a field in Southern Illinois when he was boy and watched men gunned down during a strike. These things were demanded and taken.
Both of those things were offered by Ford (and others) without federal law forcing it as a way to attract the best workers away from his competitors, and as companies saw it worked, many followed suit. They've been obtained in many countries without using labor unions to force the govt to legislate them. Unions in the US fought for them, but those things were likely coming anyways as people got richer through producing more goods. And there are enough cases of those things being offered in non-union places long before federal law that it's not honest to say they are here solely because unions.
The point is unions did not solely give us those things, or they would not also appear in places without such a labor movement. Many factors contributed to these things, unions, more production, i.e., more wealth for everyone, which are results of lot of pieces of progress.
>Working hours are longer [0].
Americans working more then other OECD countries is not the result of unions or capitalism. It's culture. Hours worked has fallen as wages rose over the past few hundred years, wages rose because people became more productive. [1]
China is a perfect example of how capitalism, not labor laws, release people from work and given them leisure and money. Under communism, there is ample labor law, which is the point of communism - all men are equal and all share. China got a two day weekend without needing unions to fight it through, they got more vacation, etc. [2] This is a result of the people making more, giving them more power, which is a result of people being more productive. It was not labor union there obtaining these things.
As they've opened to capitalism, allowing growth by more efficient allocation of capital, the everyday person has vastly improved quality of life. The same pattern played out in USSR->Russia for a while, which then went back some on the capitalism part. India did the same. Other countries followed suit.
[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
Ironically, this is one of the topics which Marx (wearing his sociologist hat) tried to get at, as well as his descendants (Weber and the Frankfurt School etc.)
>Under communism, there is ample labor law
Under Communism there wouldn't be labour law because there is no such thing as "labour" requiring a law - labour law literally only exists due to its position in relation to capital.
>China got a two day weekend without needing unions to fight it through
This is due to a combination of China being founded by Socialists (and despite not being a Socialist state, needing to keep up appearances of being one) and importing already established Western ideas (in a very similar way to what Japan did).
>more efficient allocation of capital, the everyday person has vastly improved quality of life.
This is not contrary to the Marian thesis that capitalism requires free workers, free in the first sense of being able to sell their labour how they wish, and free in his more ironic sense of freedom from the means and produce of production.
I'd like to see how this >50% is distributed across various measures, especially in terms of salaries and lines of codes produced. My bet is that according to Pareto's distribution they fall in the bottom 50% in terms of headcount whose output and compensation is ~15% of the total.
At my last corporate job I was very vocal about the benefits that unions would have for software engineers. I still believe that.
It's not a situation like Detroit in 1954. It's a somewhat global marketplace with easily shifted capital and labor.
Unions can add value in industries that need vast numbers of highly specialized individuals.
If you think of a film or a play, both unionized industries, a production works by hiring a mess of specialists who show up ready to go. Everyone knows what they're doing, why they're there, etc. There's a very good discussion (with a libertarian economist, no less) here[1] about it.
There is a large part of game development, especially in the "blockbuster" game development that seems like it fits this model quite well.
It might not apply to more specialized elements like game engine design, but for modern games that are designed more like movies than games, it could be highly effective.
[1]: http://www.econtalk.org/mitch-weiss-on-the-business-of-broad...
what's hard is replacing programmers, but we're getting there, no worries.
FYI - there is a vast difference in quality and talent between good and bad plumbers/carpenters.