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Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

I've been an employee for 80% of my career and from a moral standpoint I believe in treating people fairly.

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.

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Then this doesn't affect you. Even in industries that have unions, the smaller shops are frequently non-union, and if you treat employees well, they won't have any incentive to organize.

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.

Let's use SAG as a blueprint for a game industry union.

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.

Union works this way in the US? Wow, this is not a clever way to achieve anything. I understand why some people are anti-union then.

Not all unions function this way, but this is one possibility.

> 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'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.

I'm not a fan of unions either. That said, I won't work more than 40 hours in a week more than a handful of weeks out of the year. I'm 44yo now, and when I took my current job, I stated I only have about 1 crunch week a quarter in me. If I have to do more than one 40-50+ hour week a quarter, then it's not me that is the problem.

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.

I'm with you on the crunch limit, few weeks a year at most and even then anything beyond 50 hours is pointless from a productivity point of view.

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).

and how do you get such things addressed at a legislative level?

Maybe unions can be useful after all!

Are you suggesting that a significant portion of legislation is because of unions? Maybe a part of it, and probably so at the state level. As it stands, I shouldn't have to be in support of a union in order to support legislation.

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