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You don't need to look any further than the film/TV industry in the US. There are any number of guilds with various rules and minimum pay scales, etc. It doesn't keep countless people from waiting tables in LA hoping for their big break.

I think developers are more like the background technical staff and startup founders are the big name actor equivalents. Founders move to SF, work hard, and generally struggle trying to become Zuckerburg as much as LA actors trying to become Chris Pratt.

But for every movie with the Micheal Bay or The Rock there are hundreds of unionized workers creating the explosions, car chases, and sets in the background. Just like developers they're the ones that make the production work but no one knows our name. (with few exceptions like John Carmack, but then again there are special effects experts with tv shows)

The job of the guild / union isn't to give everyone a job who wants one, though. It's to ensure that people who have a job are treated fairly.

Yes, but that's important to know if you're proposing unionization in the hopes that it will make it so that every qualified person who wants to work in game development is paid fairly. Like with acting, only a small fraction of people will find such jobs, even with unionization.

But the point is they often go beyond ensuring people are treated fairly, and artificially drive up wages by constraining the supply of labor. This is a very unfair system. It benefits those they have the privilege to get into the guild (which often entails having the right connections, and until the Civil Rights movement also had the requirement of "be White"), at the expense if those that don't get into the guild. It also drives up costs for consumers.

I think it's a difficult claim to make that there's no demand when they specifically state that unpaid overtime is the norm. Why would they need overtime work if there were enough workers?

They don't need it. They do it because it's more profitable. If you don't want those conditions they can easily find someone else willing to accept them due to the huge hiring pool available.

Edit: you're far less likely to risk burning out your employees if they are hard to replace.

I think the fact that they can get unpaid work, means they don't need to pay for it. Why pay for 10 people when you can get 5 to do it? No matter how little you pay for labor, free (i.e. unpaid overtime) is cheaper.

Which is why, in this case, unionization isn't just (to paraphrase) ignoring that there's not enough demand.

One intended result is that it would forcibly remove the option of externalizing the consequences of intentionally under-utilizing the labor pool. It prevents bad behavior (behavior that should already be illegal IMO). Freely exploiting your workers because they have no bargaining power should always discouraged.

While I certainly agree, the historical record suggests that unionization often requires a certain amount of labor scarcity in order to happen in the first place. Of course, enough scarcity and the workers won't see the need, perhaps because there isn't any, but in cases of superabundance of labor it is extraordinarily difficult (usually impossible) to successfully unionize.

I certainly agree that unions can make a big difference in the intermediate case.

You might be right here. In an ideal world, limitations on unpaid overtime would already protect these workers, and then there would be little or no perceived benefit for the unions they are talking about.

Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours than to have more workers working for less time. Especially when you're not paying them for overtime.

>Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours

That depends on whether fixed costs of hiring another developer (and coordination costs) outweigh the variable costs of the current developers working more. The variable costs could be lesser quality of work when the developer is overworked or overtime laws.

Overtime laws are supposed to act as a penalty on companies for not hiring enough labour for the required task.

You answered your own question. The fact that people will put up with all that overtime pretty much sums it up.

Living on a country where unions are horizontal to the industry, with a couple of them supporting people on the computing world, regardless of the company, this US point of view keeps surprising me.

I guess in that case it would come as a bigger surprise that I'm from the EU, and from a country where unions are quite well established, and have never been to, studied, or worked in the US.

> there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.

Unionization in the game industry is not about magically thinking that higher salaries will appear out of thin air. It's about low-ranking employees coordinating with each other to correct some of the power imbalance versus executives so that rank and file can get a larger share of the pie.

> This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.

But why would a surplus of developers need to correlate with a surplus of executives?

If anything it makes more sense to see a larger rift between workers and executives/investors because the costs for developers have been driven down by competition among them.

I may concede that overall it could be better with a union, but lets not pretend this will mean all current game devs will make more money. You will have less game devs who will be making more money (narrowing the gap to execs in the industry) while others get driven away from the profession.

>Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.

What a shallow definition of Unions.

How about it's about grabbing a larger share of the pie for workers, so the CEO of Activation isn't making 300x the average worker? Or are you of the mind he's "earned" that?

Pretty sure that comment is referring to unionizing within the games industry where there is an overabundance of qualified people who want the jobs available.