If Kickstarter can do it, the game industry can do it! Come on, game industry, it's your time to unionize!
But they get overtime. From the IATSE contract with Disney:
"... all time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Except as otherwise herein provided: Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 ½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."
"Crunch time" gets very expensive for employers.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/22/17149822/gdc-2018-igda-rou... [2] https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ [3] https://animationguild.org/
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2017-06-07/nhk-pro...
[2] https://kotaku.com/an-insider-s-look-at-working-in-the-anime...
People who want to make games (or discover dinosaur bones, or paint, or do other professions that are correlated with a deep, almost-aesthetic, passion) are competing with other people just like them. Since they tend to be so passionate about these things, they bid each other down. They work just a few more hours a week without pay then the next guy, just because they would so much rather build video games than standard dev work.
And before you know it, the field is treated worse. But it's an equilibrium worse, brought about by rational agents trading off work-life balance for work-passion.
A worker owned business is either a partnership or a co-op. The forms have been around for centuries. They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
That logic doesn't actually follow; even if they performed equally, capital owners get more return in conventional firms (because they get all the returns, not just partial returns from lending capital), so they will favor conventional firms. So, all other things being equal, employee-owned firms have a disadvantage in access to capital and so can be expected to be less common than traditional firm unless they outperform enough to negate the return disadvantage for capital providers.
I don’t see any disagreement between what you wrote and I did outside of companies with explosive growth trying to dominate an industry, i.e. VC.
If your aim is to build a cooperative supermarket chain like the Coop in the U.K. banks will happily lend once you have a proven business plan. So someone does need to put up the initial capital but once you have a proven business model you’ll be able to borrow from banks and capital markets in the same way as conventional firms.
Your argument fails to address the sectors where partnerships and cooperatives dominate, law, accounting and management consulting. I’m sure there are others but the fact that every twenty years or so the Big 4 all spit out a giant services company but they don’t change their own corporate structure is suggestive that a partnership model works. And McKinsey, Bain or BCG would have no trouble accessing capital if they wanted to stop being a partnership.
I've heard European trade unions are more flexible and are as far as technical aspects allow for more more individual progress outside of say a union / employer agreement.
To be clear, this is just what I've heard about European unions. I've had no personal experience with them.
For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.
This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.
I've seen a lot of "Feel free to learn new skills" / "But no way are we going to let them be a requirement / judged for advancment because that would be bad for those with seniority who don't want to learn it...." type policies.
And if you're in a related field outside the union... you're just hosed, and unions are surprisingly not interested in growing in to closely related areas at times even if their PR says otherwise. I suspect those areas are dealt away with in the negotiations.
The unions that have actually been successful at growing their membership during this era of reaction, such as the SEIU, tend to be a lot more progressive and forward looking.
There is also an aesthetic thing at play here and the older dudes just don't like the idea of tech workers, professional workers, and "pink collar" jobs unionizing because they're not "real" workers. If we made hard-hats and tool-belts part of the standard nurse's uniform we could probably make some real strides. . .
Very possibly at the destruction of as many jobs in established industries. That's not really a clear win for electrical workers. This is especially true if new employers living off of the GND subsidies decides not to use the senior union members or the union at all.
The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are required to be represented by the same union; they have no choice in the matter. Once the union is established, it is almost impossible to decertify it, so the union corporate structure will never feel any real pressure from the employees.
In almost every other country, employees can choose alternative representation, which means the unions are forced to compete with each other for membership, and they are not guaranteed to represent employees at that company in perpetuity. This creates a healthier and less exploitative dynamic.
The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
I agree that some competition could help in this matter since so many unions at this point no longer need to fairly represent their members as a whole due to their ubiquity in the industry. Also I feel that many of them are so large that they would have too many conflicting interests within the union and could be harming as many people as they help with a choice.
Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.
that doesn't mean you can't try to mitigate the worst aspects of it. here are some suggestions to start:
* saner hours
* better pay, so that you can live on 40 hours a week or less of this work.
* comprehensive medical insurance including good mental health care
* free on-site confidential psychological counseling
programmers and other usually direct employees of software companies can have it bad, but they usually don't have it nearly as bad as the content screeners.
> I'm not sure what could be done.
me either, really, but there are some reasonable things we can try. i don't think we should just abdicate responsibility on this because it's hard and those people don't have much power.
There's nothing particularly unusual about game dev jobs or companies compared to other areas of tech (especially including startups); it's just that there are a lot of people who want to work on games. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades now.
Yet they have the SAG-AFTRA union which had a strike to force better working conditions from games companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016–17_video_game_voice_act...
Further acting is older than gaming, and those unions were given space to form during a period of time that was very different from today.
In the 1930s back when union organizing was likely to get you beaten by goons or assassinated by hitmen/the mob? Or in the 1940s and '50s, when active membership in the union put you at risk of getting brought up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and blacklisted from ever working again?
IATSE Local 728 has an article about their own history that doesn't gloss over the bad stuff.[1]
[1] https://www.iatse728.org/about-us/history/the-war-for-warner...
The concept is similar, the volume of people is vastly different, however.
Judging by the gamer-centric media, it seems like most of them hate the industry and most of the major companies in it. They love small developers, they love making games, they love their Twitch streamers, but they hate the companies with a burning passion.
Unfortunately, that passion often gets channeled into harassing women and minorities instead of going anywhere productive.
The all too common path seems to be enter the industry for a few years, endure crap that none of your friends that do similar jobs outside of the industry endure for a lot less money, actually want to plan for the future at some point, then get a job outside of the industry, and even though you love games, you just can't go back to getting mistreated.
That was what I did, and lots of other coworkers I had, and is why the industry seems to have a huge dearth of senior talent.
So the people who would be most willing to unionize are no longer in the industry to do so.