FTA: "Activision Blizzard employees are also calling for an end to mandatory arbitration in employee contracts, which prevent workers from taking conflicts with their employer to court, policies to improve representation of women and marginalized groups, the publication of salary data, and an audit of the company by a diversity, equity and inclusion taskforce."
Are we OK with employees being treated like this? Are we willing to make concessions on our relationships with our employer under threat of losing our jobs (outsourcing is just one of the many ways a job can be taken away).
I’m of the thinking that companies should not be able to abuse the inherent power they hold as employers to deny some pretty basic rights like the ability to sue from individual employees.
As far as not being able to get a job goes, it sounds like your real complaint is that there aren't enough jobs. That will be true whether or not a workplace is unionized in most cases since the employer has a certain amount of work they need done by a certain number of people.
Maybe one or two, but not a large proportion of an aging workforce riding purely on the protection of the union
Unions had their day, now they are just slush funds and protections for bad people.
Actually teachers in those were those who had been accused of misconduct and then either they were awaiting arbitration, mostly because the state wasn't paying their agreed proportion of arbitration fees, or arbitration had cleared them and the state wasn't returning them to their jobs as agreed. Some may have been bad teachers but most were just people the admins had taken a dislike to. Blaming the unions for that is pure propaganda.
I don't think you really interpreted my statement fairly. Perhaps I should have chosen another word instead of aging, but I was thinking in the traditional factory sense where there is a correlation with age and performance doing manual labor. Age should not be the indicator, performance should.
At convention centers they inflate prices by passing rules that no one but a union worker can carry anything into the convention center. The monitor broke and your booth and you run to best buy to get a replacement. Sorry, find a unionized person to carry it in for you or GTFO. Oh, you want to plug in it in? Sorry, call a unionized electrician or be sued.
An aerospace it meant everyone's role was super strict and trying to do anything outside your role was against the rule. In software that would mean things like front end programmer not allowed to touch backend code. UI programmer not allowed to touch business logic code. Etc.... Maybe someone will argue that's a good thing but AFAICT it just slowed work to a crawl and made people uncooperative
Was it because of regulations (ie who's certified for maintenance on X airplane type) ?
Ironically I have never heard of anyone going to management stating that they wanted to be out of the agreement that was settled for the industry they were in, regardless of their actual job.
If the government came out with a monthly 10k usd handout, I'd call it shortsighted and dumb. Doesn't meant I'm not taking it regardless.
Unions I’ve worked in or am familiar with do care about seniority over merit as you mention. They also make it so new jobs need to go to internal candidates over external candidates. Furthermore, internal candidates are even provided retraining opportunities. Management needs to show there is no one in the organization capable of doing the job before opening it externally.
A union is political in it's very nature (and of course it's an organisation).
In certain cases such as entertainment, it might be desirable to maintain markets as a significant fraction of the industry, but we've seen how large concentrations of private money lead to companies taking "safe" and monoculture approaches to movies, games, etc.
We already have huge concentrations of media doing their own planning exclusively for their own benefit right now. The planning should be made democratic.
The workers will control their workplaces. The exact division of control of the industry will have to be negotiated politically and the way the rewards are shared between industry and the public generally will also be democratically decided. There are many proposals for how this might be done.
It's helpful to think about the division of labor between town, state, and federal levels. The company would form a new democratic level. It forms a political entity now, but not a democratic one.
The slogans are helpful because they elicit questions like yours.
1) Most people in this country don't vote (outside of a slim majority in presidential elections) for a large variety of reasons, but mostly because they know it doesn't change anything for them. The American system was designed as a system of baffles to insulate the elites from the rabble quite explicitly (indirect election of senators, 3/5 compromise, bicameral legislature with senate apportioned by territory instead of people, voting restricted to white male property owners (literally a vote by the elite only), etc), but these days it has developed into an effective democratic illusion in a path dependent fashion. So in other words, I don't think the country is split in this way, but the partisans of the two flavors of the single political party are highly polarized. Neither of them have any concern for workers, note the total lack of economic issues in their agendas and the tomfoolery around 15 $/hr minimum wage. More political participation would right the ship imo.
2) There are cases where votes are split fairly evenly on contentious issues. I'm not sure that private dictatorships are always better on these questions. Sometimes the mad king flip flops constantly, other times a hard line is taken against the will of half the people. It's something that has to be worked out politically and possibly with leadership. In some cases, I do think such things require constitutional remedies (for example, no one should be allowed to vote to re-institute slavery for example). For such close votes, I would shy away from saying the result is "the people's will", but an outcome of process. Votes are one method of measuring the will of the polity. Unfortunately, I don't think there's ever a way to be completely precise as it's possible even for people to change their minds and switch sides on an issue en mass!
One example of a vote I would be skeptical of: the way Uber rigged the wording of the recent proposal to recognize its employees as contractors to get out of a court ruling. They made it sound like voting yes was voting no. Votes are really effective ways to do democracy, but I don't think there's any method we can use that allows us to stop thinking critically about it.
Of course money itself is mostly an abstraction. It represents the value of human creation, and you don't need rich people to create value with and for other humans.
The question is not “what is the ultimate origin of the money”, but “by what mechanism does it come to be allocated to the project”.
I think some would answer “the funding for the project should be democratically allocated by the employees of the company, from previous company income”, which, I suppose is coherent, though I think some substantially overestimate how much of a benefit it would have.
And while I certainly support worker cooperatives as a company model, even that doesn't require funding for new initiatives to be "democratically allocated by employees of the company". There's still usually at least some form of hierarchy.
We really need to get over the worship of rich people in this country. Having more money than God doesn't mean they should be treated like gods. In fact, what it means, in almost every case, is that they exploited workers in some form or other to get their fortune. The only exceptions I know of are people like MacKenzie Scott, who got their billions from someone who exploited workers to get their fortune.
I didn’t think they were; I thought we were just talking about people who own (controlling shares in), or lead, companies, and their influence over the processes of the development of the games (both in terms of the working environment, and the content of the game).
Perhaps I read over a previous part of the thread too quickly?
I’m confused as to what the disagreement is about? It is in some way about “capitalists” and game development funding, but like, everyone understands that games aren’t funded by a single person paying a group of people to develop a particular game. What is the actual disagreement here?
____
Regarding the worship of the wealthy , that would, of course, be idolatry, and bad. I’m confident that I’m not doing that.
____ Regarding “exploited workers” : perhaps due to me being perhaps strongly biased, I don’t really, feel compelled by this phrase. It means very little to me. When people say “exploited workers”, as far as I can tell, all it means is “profited by employing people” + the speaker disapproves of that. The emotive language doesn’t compel me to agree with their disapproval.
Curious what definition of capitalist you are using here.
Three common meanings according to the Oxford dictionary are:
1. a person who invests capital in business enterprises.
2. an advocate of capitalism.
3. a very wealthy person.
You can advocate capitalism and also support behavioral standards and worker rights in the workplace. It's not anti-capitalist to disagree with your employer's policies or culture, standing up for you and your fellow workers' bottom line can be capitalistic in of itself.
If there's a market for services to help individuals assert their rights and fight for better conditions, then investing in this market is as fundamentally capitalistic as investing in a market that services the opposite.
As a capitalist, you could even invest in both these markets at the same time. Check out this index fund:
https://www.invesco.com/us/financial-products/mutual-funds/q...
There's Altria (cigarettes) and Anthem (health insurance). Tesla (EVs) and Exxon (gasoline/petroleum). Even Activision (corporation of topic) and Stryker (actually no idea what this company does, so assuming they fund and profit off worker strykes). The thing about capitalism is that it doesn't run from conflict or mobs or regulation, it profits off the needs and desires these things create.
If the issue you have with management is harassment primarily, is it possible to create a union only to resolve that issue? Many may not want to give up individual bargaining on pay or hours simply because they wanted collective bargaining to deal with workplace harassment culture. How can an individual on the fence about supporting a union have guarantees to prevent that scope creep when forming a union? Or is it an all or nothing proposition? I.e. the union must negotiate everything on your behalf or it can not exist.
For example, from https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/guide-to-the-guild
"We are the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), a labor union composed of the thousands of writers who write the content for television shows, movies, news programs, documentaries, animation, and Internet and mobile phones (new media) that keep audiences constantly entertained and informed. "
If you are a television producer hiring a writer, you don't go to the WGA. You just interview a bunch of writers, select the one you want, and offer them the job. Like you would any other job, really, except that if the writer is a member of the guild then the terms of employment must meet some certain standards, with rules about crediting and overtime, etc. But so long as you adhere to the guild's rules, it's like hiring any other independent contractor.
But if you're a ship captain wanting to offload cargo, you go to the longshoreman's union and as for N day workers. You don't pick who, and you don't negotiate rates other than specifying (and paying for) the desired experience level. You ask for N longshoremen, and you get N warm bodies and the bill.
To the point of this conversation, a guild makes more sense in a creative project where the skill and art of the worker matters to the end result. If you're producing a TV comedy, you really need to make sure you employ the correct writers. Likewise for game designers.
That being said, even if you don't accept that, there are unions (not guilds) for independent contractors in the creative fields for example in the UK the musicians' union and Equity (the actors' union). If you are hiring musicians or actors in the UK you will for sure be hiring the specific people you want and they will very likely be members of the union.
Your example about hiring union workers may be how it works in the US but is not the case in other countries - you would hire them just like any other independent contractor or employee.
Source: I have been a member of both creative and non-creative unions in my career. I've been in the musicians' union and my wife and many friends are members of the ISM (another union for musicians with more traction in the classical music world) and I have also been a member of a more conventional union (the GMB or "General Municipal and Boilermakers' union") believe it or not. In no case have I ever been hired on the basis of a process like you describe.
I take my 40h week, health insurance, vacations anywhere I feel like, paid overtime, over some magical wage in exchange for less benefits that exploit working class.
Anyone that feels it isn't their thing is free to make their own business, free of union agreements and see how they manage for themselves in the market.
In the United States this is not true. In many states once the union is established in an industry, it becomes illegal to operate a new business without the union.
We have bad union laws.
But also I didn't say union laws are bad. There are some specific industries/occupations in which unions are A Good Thing. What I said is that the laws we have around unions are really non-ideal and lead to worse outcomes for everybody.
I happen to see it in other way.
Then again, I surely wouldn't like to be on US during the McCarthy era.
EDIT: To elaborate, if you are in a bind, you have usually four places to turn. The employer, the state, your coworkers and other workers in a union, and the people generally (via the media, protests, etc). Your coworkers are likely to have similar interests to you and are strategically positioned to make demands by virtue of the fact they have their hands on the levers of production. Take your pick.
Speaking out against a company while not unionized means you'll have your coworkers sympathy, if nothing else. Do the same against a union in the US and you can forget having even that.
Closed shop, one-union-per-company is surely the worst of both worlds. You end up with two managerial classes that you have no power against.