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Collective bargaining is not at all incompatible with a "free market." It's just a smarter way to negotiate (more power collectively) and the end result is a contract between a company and a group of workers. It's not like, say, a minimum wage where government sets a price.

>>Collective bargaining is not at all incompatible with a "free market.">>

For what it's worth, collective bargaining is, from an economic perspective, a monopoly. In anti trust terms it would constitute an illegal combination in trade if it weren't for statutory exemptions that explicitly give it a pass.

It's not really any more a monopoly than the business itself is.

The business/management is a group of people acting under a common umbrella seeking (naïvely, and oversimplifiedly) to trade the least money possible for the most production possible.

The employees/union are a group of people acting under a common umbrella seeking (naïvely, and oversimplifiedly) to trade the least production possible for the most money possible.

A union seeks to even the playing field between management and labor. It's not a monopoly unless the local union is affiliated with a global union that includes the vast majority of all workers in that particular field.

If I cannot work for a company without joining a union, it is a monopoly.

What if I'm a junior worker on a labour market that is saturated by more experienced and skilled workers, and lowering my rate is the only chance to make it in the industry that I have? Existing union and it's members are my natural competitors.

If you're a junior worker in a field dominated by unions, I'm not sure how you can have "rate" to lower that hasn't already been set based on the market rate—which is already taking those unions into account.

And the evidence is overwhelming that unionized workers make more than non-union workers of equivalent skills/qualifications. So it sounds like this boils down, once again, to the argument, "I am amazing and exceptional, and I'm afraid that if there were unions, I wouldn't be able to get more money for being amazing and exceptional."

First of all, this argument cannot be true for the majority of workers—by definition, most people in any given field are not exceptional. So even if it would benefit you to not have a union, it would not benefit most people.

Second of all, there is absolutely no requirement for unions to prevent compensation from being increased based on actual performance. Some unions may have strict seniority-based pay schedules, but not all that currently exist do, and if we were to create a brand new union for tech workers (or just for game devs), then the people actually forming that union would be the ones to decide what its priorities would be.

you also cannot work for a company without working for said company (and their management)

Are they also a monopoly?

They are a monopsony rather than a monopoly

Joan Robinson studied labor and monopsony, her books are very illuminating for anyone interested

Collective bargaining is more of a cartel (a labor cartel in this particular instance) than a monopoly. As one of the gp's pointed out, collective bargaining is not per se anti-free market (e.g. health insurance). Neither for that matter are cartels or monopolies so long as government interference remains absent. After all, free association is a right endowed to every market participants and it is a person's right to do as he/she will with it. I think the issue in this case relates more to national labor law creating uneven advantages for labor contra capital.

I actually elaborated on that in another comment in this thread.

Unions are bureaucracy. Adding politics, people and power to any structure inherently adds inefficiencies.

If individual bargaining is working just fine in an industry, then I would not push for collective bargaining. Because, it is tradeoff is between 'bridging the information asymmetry between how much power you think you command, vs what you actually command' and 'inefficiencies added by bureaucracy'.

Gaming has clearly crossed that tradeoff threshold. IMO, big tech has not.

Inefficiencies aren't always bad.

Efficiency, for example, is often the opposite of robustness. Many companies have learned that the hard way when COVID hit, even though they had an efficient supply chain and production pipeline, it was not robust.

I guess part of it is just personal anecdotes. India was (democratically elected, but single party monopoly) socialist from 1945-1991. It is still pseudo-socialist in many senses.

Watching how deeply these inefficiencies from bureaucracies plague us, has been genuinely angering.

So yeah, I do come into it with personal priors which lead to be deeply suspicious of any unnecessary inefficiency. (emphasis on unnecessary. Your covid example clearly shows that the word necessary itself is subjectively evaluated)

You're getting downvoted but you raise a fair point. Sometimes, the inefficiencies from bureaucracies don't trade off and create more robustness or greater scale. Sometimes they are purely extractive or arguably corrupt.

With that said, is it really fair to call India pseudo-socialist? For all intents and purposes, India is closer to the EU and a region/confederation of nations than it is to a single country. One can say that inefficiencies from Indian bureaucracy plague the country, but that would be to treat India like a monolith, which it certainly is not.

India is a panoply of genetic, cultural, and linguistic diversity -- a plurality, and one of the world's oldest democracies. Even so, India's growth remains blistering in real terms. Perhaps we see things a certain way because our finite lives exist in a certain point in history; but could our children or grandchildren see India the same way we see China today?

It's personally hard to fathom that the answer is yes, but it's equally hard for me to fathom that the answer is no. In a way, I almost expect to be surprised.

I'd go further: many people died because the healthcare industry has embraced efficiency (likely not the precisely right word) at the expense of robustness.

The healthcare industry used exactly that argument to bottleneck the economy and create a lot of inefficiencies so healthcare can't be provided to everyone. Lots of lives would be saved if it got a lot easier for immigrant doctors to practice, but that would be too efficient and not "robust" enough so they can't do it.

I agree that immigrant doctors should have an easier time practicing (and that we should be producing more doctors regardless of their origin). I think that the overall lack of qualified medical workers did lead to unnecessary deaths during the worst of the pandemic.

I think a robustness/efficiency dichotomy isn't the right way to look at this. One doesn't preclude the other. A medical system that is both efficient and robust is certainly possible. This discussion deserves its own thread.

Companies are bureaucracy, and owners still find value in consolidating their interests by incorporating.

Workers can find the same value in consolidating their interests by unionizing.

Collective bargaining takes away my right to bargain for certain agreements for myself.

That is definitely a free market restriction on my rights as a worker, to have a mutual agreement with that specific company.

> Collective bargaining takes away my right to bargain for myself

But it doesn't, you can choose to not be part of the union

No, you missed the point.

The union puts a limit on the contracts that I can make with the company.

So I would be prevented from bargaining for certain contracts with a company.

So me and this other company's mutual right to make an agreement would be limited by the union.

These limits are in your favor, you are free to negotiate contracts within the limits. I fail to see how the right to work for less pay than what others see as the absolute minimum fair pay is a right that's worth keeping.

This is a bit like saying that criminal law takes away your right to be mugged, beaten, and murdered.

> you are free to negotiate contracts within the limits.

So then I am not free to negotiate, and me and this other company right to engage in a mutual agreement are prevented.

Yeah, that's my point.

> I fail to see how the right to work for less pay

I get paid way way way more money than the average unionized tech worker, where they exist.

So actually, my ability to negotiate for myself, outside of the restrictions of a union, has worked out pretty darn well for me.

> the absolute minimum fair pay

Oh that's funny. You aren't aware that union contracts cover much more things than just a minimum wage.

The whole point is that many union provisions can be bad for many people and are not strict benefits for workers.

Minimum pay was an example, collectively bargained contracts offer other protections as well, but these differ more from case to case, so I didn't bring them up.

I have also negotiated my pay up, but under the umbrella of collective bargaining agreements. As far as I know, you are always able to negotiate your pay up. This has worked pretty well for me as well.

> but these differ more from case to case

Ok... and thats my point. Certain union provisions are bad, for many people, and you cannot pretend that they are a universal good.

> you are always able to negotiate your pay up

Non-union jobs in tech pay way way more, than most union tech jobs though, and union provisions prevent certain contracts that many workers would prefer.

So the actual, measurable facts show that I and many others, in non-union jobs, are doing way better than most unionized tech workers.

In the US, unions fight hard to take that choice away from people. "Right to work" laws in many states allow people to opt out of union membership and fees. Unions hate these laws and fight relentlessly to get them overturned.

"Right to work" laws force unions to represent workers who are not union members.

The truth is that no one is forcing you to work a union job.

A union is free to negotiate a contract that only applies to their own members, they just prefer not to so they can prevent non-members from competing using more favorable terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members-only_unionism

> The truth is that no one is forcing you to work a union job.

That's pretty disingenuous. Try working for government at any level without also working for a union. I could turn your argument around and say, "if you want a union job just go find one!"

Regardless, that choice you speak of represents a profound injustice according to union leaders. The ultimate goal of mainstream political labor movements is universal unionization. They would very much like to make it so that everyone is forced to pay union dues, no matter where they work.

> Collective bargaining takes away my right to bargain for certain agreements for myself.

No, they don't. Actors are able to negotiate themselves and with the help from their union, and they're all members of SAG-AFTRA.

> and they're all members

So, in other words, their rights to bargain and engage in mutual agreements is restricted.

You literally just explained how their rights are limited.

Specifically, it is limited in that you have to be a part of this group, to engage in certain agreements.

And even within that group, people are prevented from engaging in certain mutual agreements.

> So, in other words, their rights to bargain and engage in mutual agreements is restricted.

You can negotiate without union representation.

You're also free to be a non-union actor.

> You can negotiate without union representation

There are limits on the contracts that I could engage with, with another mutually interested party, is the point.

If there were no limits, then, almost by definition, it would not be a union.

So yes, a union puts limits on the contracts that mutually interested parties can engage in.

Were you not aware that unions put limits on the contracts that mutually interested parties can engage in?

Did you think that a company, and an interested worker, could just completely ignore union rules, and create their own contract, that conflicts with the rules of the union?

Unions are a part of the free market, unless you'd like to remove people's freedom to associate just because they all happen to work at the same place.

The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job.

Also the EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft studios do consistently deliver quality games: COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc. Formulaic, perhaps, but it's tough to claim that these aren't quality and popular games. Valve, on the other hand, have only produced Half Life: Alyx in the last decade (you could include Artifact, but it flopped).

Dota 2 has been in continuous development since 2011. The players have been kept quite happy.

the alternative isn't "no job", it's a higher-paying but perceived-as-boring web dev job

For programmers, sure. But for artists, QA, animators, and game designers (which collectively make up a far greater proportion of game development than programmers) not really. There are other jobs in these fields, but often with about the same compensation and without the allure of working on video games.

> The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job.

Wait until you hear about the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA.

What exactly do you mean by proper balance? What you said later in the comment basically applies to all large companies:

> The wages are below what the market pays, hours are exploitative and the companies are making massive profits

It is impossible for the wages at all large companies to be below what large companies pay. What large companies pay is what defines the market rate because most people work for large companies.

I think they mean the wages at large [game studios] are below the average for large [software companies in general].

No, nynx said all large companies. They did not restrict themselves to game developers or software companies.

If I am unhappy with how Google/big-N tech company works, there are other options. If I feel exploited, I can start my own consultancy and consult with just a couple of clients. I can start a startup and raise money quite easily in this VC market. I can built small POCs for a few customers within a few months and scale up from there. I can switch companies and go to a competitor. Hell, switching is almost always the more lucrative option.

I do not need a huge amount of money to enter or move around in the market, and even if I do, it is readily available. That's a 'free-ish' market.

Getting funding for an unmade indie game is substantially harder. The first demo takes years instead of months. The employee has zero leverage, because their access to the market is artificially limited through only a few hyper competitive AAA channels. There are many such broken markets, gaming is just an extreme case of it in our tech world. SpaceX worked in almost exactly the same manner. The free market doesn't work, because the market is not free.

In such a non-free market, the one who controls the supply (AA dev) can easily set up an almost ponzi scheme-esque revolving door of hyper exploitative setups. (modern academia with post-doctoral adjunct revolving doors is a similar example). The AAA studio is taking advantage of information asymmetry, and massively profiting from this use-n-throw setup.

Unions are a way for the demand side to combat the latent asymmetry of information and power in the non-free market. AAA studios make big promises to starry eyed new-grads who have served their purpose by the time they realize they were lied to and are disillusioned. (ie. Contract workers don't get made permanent. Crunch, hire-n-fire, lack of upwards mobility in the structure are endemic and permanent afflictions in the industry)

Unions can force companies to enforce the promises they make. No more than x% crunch. No un/under-paid interns. Path from contract-> fulltime. Some level of ethical standard for exploitation of school children using gambling techniques. Profit sharing ?

If the union's demands are too unreasonable or not reflective of their leverage in the industry, they will get left to die. (see the political unions at Google) If this was truly an information asymmetry situation, where game devs were paid lower than they were worth, then the union will flourish and sustain itself in the interest of the employees.

The realities of the unfree-market do not change, but the union makes sure that demand side (people who want jobs) can negotiate in a manner that actually reflects the cards they hold.

My opposition to unions in general comes from my general opposition to unnecessary bureaucracy. Bureaucracy should be avoided in don't fix what's not broken situations. Big Tech's free market looks healthy. Don't need unions. Gaming does not. Maybe Unions will help. Simple as that.

> media production. It works.

Does it work? Wasn't it medium (or someone) who when faced with unionization pivoted the company (left severance packages) to a substack like model?

Media production such as film, tv, etc. The online world is not indicative of the benefits brought by the media guilds. I am no expert on their benefits but thought it would help to clarify what media has historically had soft power unions.