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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

My highlights:

> 90% of the workers indicated their support for joining CWA and authorized CWA to be their bargaining representative

> about half of whom work in the New York City headquarters and half of whom work remotely throughout the country

> Employees at major American tech and game companies have grown increasingly active and outspoken about workplace issues, including sexual assault and harassment, ageism, unequal pay, “crunch time” (i.e. long-term overtime and overworking), poor treatment of contract workers, inadequate racial and gender diversity, and lack of transparency and inclusion in decision-making around controversial contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

> “We appreciate that unlike so many employers, the Glitch management team decided to respect the rights of its workforce to choose union representation without fear or coercion."

> CWA was founded by telecom workers, and supports media workers through its Newsguild-CWA and NABET-CWA sectors.

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Game studios especially need this. I'm a conservative in most other labor-related things (liberal on social issues), but holy shit the devs are abused by the game studios.

Completely disagree. They aren't miners working in horrible conditions where that's the only job in town. Game developers are highly talented, skilled individuals. There is a high demand for such people outside the game industry they choose to stay there. I'm a developer in the finance industry. Worked in a few other sectors too. If games industry is harsh, jump ship. Abused? Get real, the working populations outside the western world are abused and with little choice (and a lot of people in the west lower down the food chain). I think it's insulting to to people with limited options no money to lump games devs in with them. Personally speaking, last thing I'd want in software industry is a Union. Graded pay scales that take no account of productivity variability is a sure fire way to kill an industry. We re a privileged bunch as developers.

"Stay in a bad employment situation" and "leave a bad employment situation" aren't the only options; workers can also collectively work to make the bad situation better. There can be a lot of good reason to do that, and I think we should be glad that people are working to make things better where they are.

Unions don't require graded pay scales. You don't have to be a miner to be systemically taken advantage of. If one employer offers an unfair employment contract, you can try another company. If every employer offers an unfair employment contract, you don't have the option of another company. I can name a few clauses that favor only the company that are present at every software employment contract in almost every state.

There are more potential employees than potential employers, and most companies will survive understaffed longer than US laborers will survive unemployed. Inherently, the negotiations favor the employer. The more output the employer has stolen from its workers, the more of an advantage it will have. Unionizing and collective bargaining balances those scales.

Could these unemployed employees start their own cooperatives that do not take advantage of employees? I want to focus on making this possible. I am, personally, concerned that trying to create some two sided balance of power will not end up representing me as both sides will have their own interest.

They need to get capital from somewhere, which has a habit of dicating terms.

> There are more potential employees than potential employers

This is exacerbated by employers either overtly colluding with each other (as in the lawsuit several years ago over tech companies having an agreement not to hire each other's employees) or simply setting compensation to "industry averages" and following "industry best practices".

To the extent that every big tech company behaves the same as every other big tech company, there's effectively only one big tech employer.

>If games industry is harsh, jump ship.

If the industry you work in sucks, jump ship? That's not exactly great advice when you've spent decades honing your craft in a certain industry. Even if someone did genuinely want to switch, game development skills aren't necessarily easily transferable to other kinds of development, even if it helps.

That advice makes sense if a company you works for sucks, but if an entire industry is broken, you can't just tell people to suck it up and find a new industry.

> Even if someone did genuinely want to switch, game development skills aren't necessarily easily transferable to other kinds of development, even if it helps.

This needs a lot of qualification. Even someone doing scripting probably has picked up coding fluency at least. Programming game engines and networking code is definitely tackling complex problems and could at least get a mid-level dev role. I think 3d asset creation is probably the most game-specific role, and even that is something that is used by special effects companies and design firms.

> That advice makes sense if a company you works for sucks, but if an entire industry is broken, you can't just tell people to suck it up and find a new industry.

You absolutely can tell people to suck it up and find a new industry. This mentality is why the game industry can get away with bad work life balance and low job security. Because people keep working there. If the game industry was starved for talent, then they'd have to offer better work experiences.

I think 3d asset creation is probably the most game-specific role, and even that is something that is used by special effects companies and design firms.

Game industry working conditions are generally significantly better than VFX and can be better than design firms looking for similar skillsets.

While I mostly agree with your comment, I do want to mention for anyone who finds it useful: there's quite a bit of modeling and simulation work in the scientific computing and research industry, including the US government and contractors that lends itself well to certain game development skillsets.

There's typically more focus on analytics and the science skills over artistic skills (sorry graphic artists, environmental artists, etc.) obviously, but backend developers in gaming often have a lot of useful overlapping skills and knowledge in terms of systems design, design patterns, sets of problems, etc.

Pay is good, work/life balance is great, intellectually stimulating, it's challenging yet enjoyable (though arguably not as fun as game development). In many cases, industry borrows or leverages work from the gaming industry quite a bit.

A step further and the defense industry/military industrial complex would also love to have more game developers--though tech has a pretty anti-government pro-business vibe overall (not surprisingly).

I've worked with quite a few developers who be jumped ship from the games industry. From what I've read it's a common pattern for for older game devs looking for sane working hours.

Former game developer here. Game studios don't need unions, they need better management. Basically, an 18-year-old QA tester gets promoted to lead QA then associate producer then assistant producer and then producer. The producer manages by industry lore. And industry lore is terrible.

Unionization is not going to fix the management training problem.

But if management has no incentive to fix itself, what pressure is there to force them to? Negative press and bad reputation of industry conditions doesn't seem to be helping. The investors don't care. Customers don't care. So the workers themselves need to push back.

> Game studios don't need unions, they need better management.

If workers unionize [1], they can force bad management out, or curtail its badness, or in extreme cases - replace management with collective ownership.

[1] - in an independent, non-corrupt union.

Or game developers can just hire non-union employees. The reality is that game development studios can get away with poor work life balance because there's people who are passionate about making games and are willing to accept poor working conditions to get a chance at their dream job. This Stage Actor's Guild exists, but aspiring actors still have to work second jobs to put a roof over their heads. When a job is a lot of people's dream job, conditions are going to be poor because the supply of potential labor is very large as compared to the demand.

Also, I have no idea where you get the idea that unions can somehow force collective ownership. The company belongs to the shareholders, unions don't magically get to take other people's property.

Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they?

I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment.

> Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they?

Very rarely do employees receive equity as compensation.

> Employees usually receive shares as comp, don't they?

Non-voting shares, yes. Voting shares are usually only given to very senior people, if ever, and not nearly enough to form anything close to a controlling ownership of the company.

> I will say that the horror stories and bad press coming out of the video gaming industry will possibly have a chilling effect for new grads who would otherwise jump straight into it. Eventually management will run out of non-union workers to hire. Or the non-union workers themselves will demand better treatment.

Decades of game development suggests otherwise. Like acting, it's people's dream job. And when the supply of labor exceeds the demand workers do not have leverage.

For decades there was no interest nor action towards unionizing in game development. Greater scrutiny into the industry from modern game journalism, and perhaps worsening experiences as the industry heads towards Hollywood-like AAA titles produced by monolithic studios, is surely causing something to change.

Game developers' experiencing the misery of crunch time and layoffs is something I've heard about firsthand since the early 2000s at the latest. Reading accounts from earlier games' development cycles suggests that this has been common for even longer than that. Game development has always had cyclical labor demands and tight deadlines.

I think you need to qualify the claim that these experiences are worsening. In fact, from most of the veteran developers I've talked to report the opposite: before the proliferation of the internet crunch time was way more serious since patching was not a viable option. Nowadays it's pretty much the norm that games have significant bugs for the first week or two and still need to mature after release. This creates greater room for error and less pressure to fix every bug before release.

That's fair, perhaps conditions haven't been substantially worse than in previous console generations. But it sounds like there's something driving the push towards unionizing/organizing, whatever it is. And it sounds like the general public is more aware it being a brutal industry.

Just because you're seeing more news stories about unionization or organizing, doesn't actually mean that there's more interest in unionizing and organizing. It just means that people producing news are writing more stories covering unionization and organizing.

Take this story for example. Linkedin lists Glitch's size as 11-50. The highest employee count I've found claims 120. This is small fish in a very large pond. This press release name drops Google, but these companies are three orders of magnitude apart in terms of size.

Prior to this, and at Kickstarter, there were no high-profile tech unions. Now there is at least two. Now you might not consider that substantially more, but that's still definitely more.

There still aren't any high profile tech unions. Glitch is 120 people with the highest estimates. Kickstarter is 258 as of March 2020 [1]. These are small companies - medium at best. By comparison there are over a million software developers in the US [2]. And that's just one of many "tech" jobs ("Computer Systems Analyst" has another 600k, "Computer Programmer has 250k). Even if we assume that every employee at these companies work in tech roles, these companies represent less than 0.02% of the tech workforce.

1. https://craft.co/kickstarter

2. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Right, but the fact that there's any movement in the industry at all, stories generating discussions such as this one, groups like the Tech Workers Coalition gaining attention, etc., can mean there's some trend shifting. Unless you think the news is selectively focusing on stories to cover and this is all media manufactured.

And when change occurs, whether a social trend, or new product type, or whatever- the pioneers tend to be smaller examples rather than high-profile, no?

> Right, but the fact that there's any movement in the industry at all, stories generating discussions such as this one, groups like the Tech Workers Coalition gaining attention, etc., can mean there's some trend shifting. Unless you think the news is selectively focusing on stories to cover and this is all media manufactured.

Again, don't conflate discussion and attention with actual change. People who produce the news always have to select their topics, so saying that the news is selectively focusing on something is a tautology. The real question is why people are selecting these topics - and you'd have to direct that question to media producers.

The reality is that approval of unions is not outside of historic trends. The last 10 years has seen a marked increase, but that increase started from historic lows. The current approval rating is not abnormally high [1].

> And when change occurs, whether a social trend, or new product type, or whatever- the pioneers tend to be smaller examples rather than high-profile, no?

In the case of unionization no, not at all. Early unionization efforts were not only industry-wide but society-wide (except for the exclusion of blacks and immigrants). Groups like the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor sought to organize all American workers. Big changes in society are usually made by big groups. The reality is that the fact that 350 workers unionizing in a field of millions has near zero effect.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-ste...

The decline of unionization in America has been noted for a long time. What's noteworthy is interest in unionizing in tech for the first time. And actual change usually requires prior discussion. Those 350 workers at least provide a small model and symbolic inspiration for future efforts.

Cool so we've gone from "high profile" tech unions to "a small model and symbolic inspiration". I think that's a much more effective expression of their significance (or lack thereof).

You set the boundary at high profile, I did not. If I recall early, my original comment is "is surely causing something to change." I made no attempt to quantify how much, nor the rate, nor the acceleration of change.

> Prior to this, and at Kickstarter, there were no high-profile tech unions. Now there is at least two. Now you might not consider that substantially more, but that's still definitely more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571261

Just because Glitch joined CWA instead of forming their own union does not erase the fact that they are a tech company that became a union shop. And 2 is definitely more than 0, that's just simple arithmetic.

Finally, I never said "high-profile" had to mean FAANG. These two are high-profile cases that gets public attention- not necessarily because the media is manufacturing a narrative, but because Kickstarter, for its small size, is a household name. And Glitch is the successor of Fog Creek Software- this company, as well as Anil Dash and Joel Spolsky, are certainly high-profile names in the tech startup scene. We're not discussing some unknown boutique consultancy.

Despite the popular belief, game developers are pretty well paid. Not every indie or QA contractor, of course, but it's a rich industry with 6 figure salaries and profit sharing/royalty bonuses in successful studios. So, of course, any union would love to represent game developers for a share of their income. Likewise, you don't often hear of, say, restaurant workers needing union representation because they do not make much money and rarely interest unions. This is what's driving calls for unionization IMHO.

And I agree with manfredo, I started in the industry in 90s, and crunch was already there. If anything, the situation improved in mid 00s, with CA strengthening exempt employees classification and later 00s with ea_spouse lawsuit. E.g. mandatory crunches are gone, it used to be that people were forced to stay late and come in on weekends even if they had nothing to do but good luck pulling this now. Nowadays people mostly crunch either because their bonus comes out of the game's sales (and/or metacritic score, like in EA) or because they are paid OT.

> So, of course, any union would love to represent game developers for a share of their income

You're talking about the large, collaborationist unions we know in the US - e.g. those in the AFL-CIO - where "the union" is an external entity to "the unionizing workers"; and often with the bureaucratic motivations you describe. I specifically mentioned that's not the kind of unionization I advise.

Also, payment is just one of many issues in a workplace. The basic need for a union is that the company's owners have the mechanisms for thinking, discussing, deciding acting collectively and concertedly, but its employees do not. That's what a union should be.

On that basis, employees may want to tackle issues like:

* Treatment by managers/management * Workplace culture * Physical working conditions * Workforce size vs. "squeezing" of existing employees * Advancement opportunities within the company/organization * Professional standards

and so on.

Finally, remember that a gaming development house has a lot of employees other than developers per se: QA, art, production, administrative etc.

> Nowadays people mostly crunch ... or because they are paid OT.

If people make a good salary, they don't work overtime because they don't need to. There must be some kind of psychological pressure in that direction. Overwork should be avoided.

- who have joint interests and may wish to discuss things, take decisions, and act collect

I am not discussing whatever reasons you envisioned for unionization of our industry from the outside. I am just noting where the unionization effort is actually coming from. Pardon my cynicism, but I don't believe the big union care about anything other than payment, which drives their fees. Otherwise, as I said, they would had been pushing in retail with, at least, same effort as they do in the games industry.

>If people make a good salary, they don't work overtime because they don't need to.

Sure, they don't need to but, nevertheless, they like their fat bonuses.

> Or game developers can just hire non-union employees.

And then immediately be sued by the union & former employees for retaliation under the labor acts. Businesses already tried that sort of shenanigans

Sued for what? If I form a union with my co-workers and demand $1,000,000 salaries it's illegal for the company to say "nope" and hire someone else?

Management is under no obligation to accept union terms, and is free to hire non-union work if the union terms are not competitive.

IANAL (not for US law anyway), but firing someone because of their trying to unionize and hiring someone else is illegal in many world states.

In the US, it looks like you can "permanently replace" union workers who are on strike.

Correct, firing someone for trying to unionize is illegal. It is illegal to retaliate against workers for trying to unionize. It's not prohibited, to the best of my knowledge, to receive a contract from a union and say, "these term's aren't competitive, we'll find other workers". Otherwise that would effectively give unions unlimited power over companies.

Right, that's illegal. Management is under no obligation to accept any particular set of terms, but they're also not allowed to just say "nope"; they're required to continue negotiating with the union until an agreement is reached.

So if me and my 2 other buddies are the only two employees at an early startup we can unionize and demand immense equity packages, and the company is prohibited from hiring additional employees if they don't like our demands?

This does not sound right - this effectively gives unions the ability to extort companies with impunity. I'll believe this claim that companies are prohibited by law from hiring a non-union workforce if you back it up with a source.

Again, they don't have to accept your demands, but they do have to negotiate rather than just telling you to buzz off. It's illegal for a business to "refuse to bargain collectively with the representatives of its employees". Many people do argue that this gives unions the ability to extort companies with impunity - it's one of the main reasons companies often fight so hard against having a union form.

(If you literally only have 2 employees, the employer might not meet the threshold to be covered under the NLRB.)

cite: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employers/b...

> It's illegal for a business to "refuse to bargain collectively with the representatives of its employees".

Right, it's illegal for a company to say "we're not going to bargain with you collectively, at all" but it's not illegal to decline the bargain that employees offer. The company at least has to sit at the table and consider their option - it does not prohibit companies from listening to the collective bargain and declining to accept it.

We may be saying the same thing from different angles. You have the right to decline the employees' proposal, but you have to try to negotiate something better, not just boot them out immediately.

Think of it in terms of something like the second amendment. Unions are similar to weapons in that they're the only real limit on the power your management has over you. The last line of defense, if you will. Without coordinated response provided by unions you _can't_ make your employer change their labor practices. If they want to make you work 16 hours a day for the same pay, there's nothing stopping them.

In an industry known for abusing its employees (which, BTW, does not extend to software engineering in general, in my opinion - software engineers are treated well almost everywhere else), you _need_ pushback to end abuse. It's as simple as that. Even if unionizations fail, they still serve as a signaling mechanism - if things get bad enough, they'll start succeeding, and that's the outcome employers would like to avoid. The solution is simple: they should pull their heads out of their collective asses and start treating employee abuse as a real problem. If there's no downside for them to not doing this, they won't do it. It's as simple as that.

Unionization literally is there to fix management problems. By giving workers a say as to what management is allowed to do

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