Epic Systems workers are organizing

Because the need for unions arises when there is a severe power imbalance between employer and employee. If I'm ever put in a position where I feel as though I am simply unable to negotiate a wage that is aligned with how I value my labor, and I feel as though this is through an exploitative advantage that the entire industry has over me, then I would start seeking other individuals in a similar situation in order to collectively gain leverage. I have not found that the software engineering industry remotely resembles this scenario, and that it is actually us engineers that hold most of the leverage advantage.

So while I recognize that there is a potential value to unionizing, short of a need for it, you're just introducing a middle-man into the relationships you establish, and unions eventually begin to take on all sorts of self-serving interests of their own. Many industries have developed to the point that the power imbalance doesn't exist between the employer and the employee, but rather the competent individual and the union.

The end goal of organisation should be worker control.

You can see it today with police unions being the biggest hawks blindly defending any police abuse and protecting them for ever being fired. This elephant in the room often gets ignored in public discourse. And the police aren't the only ones.

I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job. Theres also a long history of racism in unions, the original forming of them in the US were to exclude low wage black workers from 'stealing' white jobs.

It seems to work well at first before slowly morphing into a rigid protection racket for current employees, locking a company down to its current structure (which only makes sense for a few slow moving homogeneous industries like factories - until of course they simply automate or move to Asia or shut down).

It's also notable people always use historical nostalgic examples to hype up some golden age of unions for jobs that no longer exist for some reason...

They've also long been covers for corruption and back room political influence.

I personally believe unions are long overdue for reform and modernization. I'd maybe support something like unions-light, but today they always come with tons of other baggage like preventing bad workers from being fired, adding tons of bureaucracy and hoop jumping, crippling companies ability to adapt to market changes, forcing people like comedians and small indie bands to hire 30 different people for individual jobs (like paying a guy $40hr to pull a cord to open the curtains and nothing else which happens in NY clubs) creating inefficiencies which hurt company growth and customers and therefore employees/economies/taxes, completely shutting down small businesses who simply can't afford to support unions, not applying well to companies with a variety of different job roles, etc.

It's like a sledgehammer when most people just want to make more $$.

Software engineers in the "regular" industry indeed are better off without unions. There's no obvious problem that unions would solve, and there are costs (unions in general add inefficiency).

In gamedev, though, salaries are low and work/life balance is traditionally very poor. I can see why some Epic workers decided to consider unionizing.

In terms of salaries, the only effective tool unions have to increase them is their ability to exclude people from employment. You can see this having a great effect with the ALPA, AMA and Bar Associations, who have all succeed in making becoming a pilot, doctor or lawyer incredibly expensive, difficult and time intensive. Regardless of the true underlying motives, their success in keeping people out of the professions is why they’re all so highly paid. This is also why union organisers believe they should have the right to prevent non-union members from seeking employment in a company they are striking against (and call such people scabs).

The more ordinary trade unions are typically much less successful in having any significant impact on salaries, because their only meaningful tool for constraining supply is the temporary impact of striking.

Unions also usually serve as a levelling mechanism, where CBAs aim to reduce the difference in remuneration between the more productive and the less productive members of staff. So whether that’s effective for any particular person would depend on how productive they are, potentially having a negative impact, positive impact, or little impact at all.

The single area where unions can easily have the most positive impact is in enforcing compliance with employment laws. It’s much harder for employers to skirt employment law when employees have union representation (unless the union in question is one of the many “yellow unions”, who primarily protect the interests of employers over employees). The flip side of that is that it is of course much harder to fire poorly performing employees (try firing a corrupt cop for instance).