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One of the largest groups of non-union employees making movies are the VFX artists. Odd coincidence that they're paid much less and have worse working conditions.

Yes, but they get access to a coffee machine and get to make memes during unpaid lunch, why would they bargain that sort of freedom away to get a union?

Not sure why downvoted: lots of tech companies offer these benefits while omitting others which are much needed.

Those guilds are incredibly hard to break into. They're also why Georgia has been able to mop up all of the non union work. For better or for worse, they do their job but out of state scabs are a huge problem keeping industry work in LA.

Oh I agree! I think the guilds are great to its membership in general, but breaking in is itself a battle.

Tech doesn’t need to copy Hollywood exactly (nor should it), but there’s a lot that can be learned from it.

Unions aren't a hack that let you subvert supply and demand. The "bad" parts of unions are what give it power. Without excluding an out-group, you're left with a useless bureaucracy.

For Hollywood, I think this is a necessary "evil" because the market rate for creative jobs is likely close to working making $0 for 80 hour work weeks. However, this isn't the same for tech.

Well, an important distinction in Hollywood versus my understanding of most other unions is that being a part of a guild does not guarantee you a job (though it is a prerequisite for many of them):

You still need to be hired by a production, who chooses to work with you and sets your rate.

The guild just provides a guarantee of pay floor, hours, conditions, healthcare, etc across and transcending individual companies.

So the guilds could theoretically let in as many people as they wanted without diluting supply and demand, because membership does not mean actively working.

The Guild system is unique because its as much as a credentialing system as a union, which is why I think it works.

> Unions aren't a hack that let you subvert supply and demand. The "bad" parts of unions are what give it power. Without excluding an out-group, you're left with a useless bureaucracy.

So much of tech in the past few decades have been about hacking regulation. Why is it when it comes to labor power, it's suddenly an impossibility?

> However, this isn't the same for tech.

Video games are notoriously underpaid and overworked, due to it being a body pit for the passionate. But that's a specific tech niche, sure.

The guilds are also good for helping to prevent too much of a race to the bottom for those who can break in and get work. They're less good for preventing people from having to wait tables between running out for auditions while waiting for their "big break."

One wonders if this has something to do with managerial hate for remote work. If the boss wants to move his production from a high-age area to a lower-wage area, the workers can't do much about it if their mobility is limited. For film and tv, you need people on set, but if your job is a desk job that can be done from anywhere, and you can get work from anywhere, you get some of that control back.

The Hollywood Guild contracts are between the guilds and the studios, so the filming location doesn't matter. Even international shoots are subject to the guild agreements.

Georgia didn't mop up any non-union filming work. The state decided to hand out a lot of tax credits for filming in Georgia, and that's the only reason studios film there.

You do NOT want to point at entertainment industry as some sort of better meritocracy model.

The ratio of nepotism hires and who-you-knowism in that industry is insane. There's a reason you have multi-generation families all "in the business".

Met plenty of people in NYC in the industry, and they are either nepotism hires or surrounded by them.

I'm skeptical this could be worse than the tech industry.

Guilds and unions aren’t in place to prevent nepotism, which is difficult to prevent and happens in all industries. Really, that’s just a network effect, albeit a bad one.

Labor organizations exist to turn disparate sources of a supply (labor) into a more monolithic source that can control some or all of the access to that supply, driving up the price, which is good the members. They may have controls in place to try to prevent nepotism or other bad hiring practices, but at the end of the day that can be a difficult problem to detect and prevent.

That doesn’t have really anything to do with the guilds, though— in fact, it would likely be worse because then those high up in a production could just elevate and pay who they choose (it’s not their money, after all).

The guilds do still have objective criteria to get in, and pay scales so that regardless of if you’re a director’s child or not, you’re getting the same pay as everyone else with your title.

Yes, nepotism in Hollywood is a well-known issue, but it’s also an issue in pretty much every industry that’s been around for multiple generations. I imagine we will see the same thing happen in tech— just as it has in healthcare, politics, sports, law, finance, and all manner of highly desirable skilled professions

WGA west has about 10k members, whole US has about 15k. (This is from Google, please correct me if I got the wrong number.) By contrast, there are over a million people building software. Will this model scale up two orders of magnitude?

WGA is just one of many unions, but you’re right— getting into the “best” guilds is itself a process; but ostensibly, it’s to ensure that the guild keeps its prestige as a genuine body of talent. It’s a balancing act for sure, and I don’t know if tech wants to emulate everything exactly with the Hollywood guild system, but it’s worth taking inspiration from.

Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?

Traditional guilds fostered apprenticeship, mentorship and relationships between practitioners that transcend firms/projects.

Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill I don’t think it’s far fetched to imagine that a guild system could be better.

> Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill

That’s not true and I suspect you know it.

I'm not sure what you mean.

It’s a fine line, but I don’t see anyone saying the members of the Hollywood guild aren’t talented— it’s a (perhaps already too hard) battle just to get in it.

However, just because you’re in the guild does not mean you have a job. Productions still have to hire and choose to work with you. Generally, if you don’t get work within sometime between 1-2 years you lose membership.

If you’re not “skilled enough” for the minimum floor pay, then the studio or show has no obligation to hire you. Don’t see why that model can’t work for tech?

The unions don't decide who gets hired for a project, only the set of terms should you hire someone from the union.

But crucially, they also decide who is in the union.

Probably in the same way that companies go about determining it now: programming tests, certifications, diplomas, etc.

Quick search suggests that United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has 1.3m members, so why not? And a union isn't always the best solution for some places, so it's easy for me to imagine smaller companies not having one while larger ones do. Or different unions for different situations and types of work.

(edited to add: Obviously the UFCW is not the type of prestige guild the WGA is. Unionizing probably isn't always the best solution, but some amount of work in tech -- QA for example (https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/2/23489932/activision-blizz...) -- could be unionized under that type of system, while other employees become members of more powerful guilds that command higher salaries.)

The other thing is, you don't need everyone covered. All the other grocers know that someone can just quit and go work at the grocery store down the road and get a certain level of pay and benefits, so they need to at a minimum, meet those same benefits to keep their employees. So it raises everyone's standard in an area.

Very little of Hollywood's work can be done remotely. Even the parts that can are essentially protected by that network that can't, they are so intertwined. Also Hollywood has a substantial moat that prevents an indie studio in Tulsa from having access to the same distribution network, etc.

Not suggesting that "big tech" doesn't have advantages, but overall, there's an entire world of software development outside of those companies where developers can contract, compete from other countries, and companies are free to hire all sorts of contract labor free of control. You don't even need a college education to do most of the work in our industry.

> You don’t even need a college edification to do most of the work in our industry

You don’t in entertainment either, I can assure you that unless you’re working at an agency or a studio salaryman, no one will ask. But those are more corporate than creative jobs, anyways.

And at least from person experience, a lot of Hollywood TV writers rooms are still remote or hybrid (they found it works better!)

> a lot of Hollywood TV writers rooms are still remote or hybrid

Yes, I was addressing that in the "Even the parts that can are essentially protected by that network that can't, they are so intertwined." part of my comment.

Supporting your point further, one of the reasons Georgia gets so much film/TV work is because they are unfriendly to unions, so labor costs are much lower.

If the studio has a contract with one of the guilds in Hollywood, the labor is still covered regardless of geographic location. Georgia has a LOT of tax breaks for film production costs which is what makes it attractive for studios.

These are guilds in a very traditional, medieval, sense: they have very exclusive membership, and drive up the cost of labor by deliberately causing shortages. This is great for the people lucky enough to be members. But it sucks both for the consumers that pay inflated prices, and for the workers who don't have the connections to get into the guild.

See also: the U.S. healthcare industry.

Except fields requiring expert knowledge (and in this case can cause injury or death) it’s very good that there are licensing and regulatory bodies that prevent any old person or group from wandering in and participating. No one dies if a script isn’t very good.

The problem with this theory is that the gaming industry has to work with the Voice Actors Guild and they are a huge pain in the ass.

The hourly rate is fine. The min/max hours is fine.

The union exclusivity clause is bullshit. They won’t even allow you to use your own company’s employees to record temporary VO. It’s all or nothing.

Expo hall unions are even worse. I have to wait 30 minutes and pay someone $50 so they can plug my surge protector into a floor outlet? Thanks but no thanks.

Working in games I have had to work with different unions on several occasions. Each experience is absolutely dreadful. I’ll pass.

Edit: downvote my opinion if you think it’s bad. that’s cool. Doesn’t change that every experience I have ever had working with unions was absolutely awful.

Oh I agree— certain things with Hollywood Guilds are exclusive for the point of being exclusive. Tech doesn’t need to, nor should it, strive to copy Hollywood exactly. We’re a completely different industry, after all

Exclusivity is a two sided coin. Speaking as someone who dealt with the Teamsters Union at a few expos myself, it can be very annoying to not be able to carry your own boxes, or plug in a new power strip. Honestly, it’s maddening.

The flip side (for me, personally) is that I believe that the conference hall would charge me the same fee with the same restrictions, pocketing a large majority of it. It’s no different than going to a stadium and spending $60 on two beers and a hotdog while the person behind the counter makes a fraction of the sale but cleans the space, warms and hauls the food, handles the sale, and puts it together and gives it to me.

So again, there is pain with the teamsters in a convention space (specifically in this context), I fully agree. But if I’m going to have to pay too much for a service I’d rather it went to working class families with stable jobs in the area I’m visiting and doing business in.

My narrator, Maxwell Glick, just informed me that there is no such thing as "the Voice Actors Guild." It's all part of SAG.

I wonder how the WGA will change its tune when language models will write episodes of indistinguishable quality from human writers.

wow it took only one comment to make the article right, and it's not only the elite, it's even the "little people" doing a lot of the hating.

Taking feedback is a sign of maturity and adaptability.

Genuinely, what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen, because people are going to use these new technologies?

Thinking about these scenarios is the POINT of a union, making sure writers stay relevant for the long-term future. Failing to address them makes for a lot of broken dreams and missed opportunities.

> what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen

Being nowhere close to this, it’s difficult to say. Maybe the creative field gets reduced to the guy who can put the right prompt into a script, voice-acting and moving-image combined model?

Scripts are already a dime a dozen! The stereotype you see in tv shows of unemployed writers writing screenplays in coffee shops is because writers of those tv shows are making fun of themselves.

An experienced writer could (and does) make an entire first draft of a script for a tv show in less than a day. Before your first job out of college you likely have 10+ scripts for movies or shows written for a portfolio. 99% of scripts written already will never see the light of day— and that includes the ones that get bought!

Hollywood does have genuine shortcomings, but I can guarantee you one is not the lack of scripts, nor even the lack of good scripts.

It is a fair point (I think your tone is what has set people off, and for the record I didn’t enjoy it either). The real question, in my opinion, is what does humanity do in general with our fellow humans whose labor is displaced by some form of automation? And that fully includes all of us here on Hacker News.

Do we prevent the lose of income to people by forming a collective bargaining group (guild, union, co-op—whatever you’d like) to prevent the job loss and maintain income? Do we tax the owners of businesses who are using large amounts of automation so that the profits are shared with larger society? Do we let the market figure out it out?

It’s an incredibly difficult and complicated question and I don’t have a good answer. But I do personally believe that the people who will be hit hardest will be average people: ourselves and our neighbors and we should consider how we want to react to that fact sooner rather than later.

I think one way to stay safe is to buy shares in competitors or disruptors. If, say, pension funds include automation companies, you get a much more resilient future.

The Level of cringe of this comment is off the charts

I wonder when SWEs will change their tune when the same thing will happen to them.

The same way SWEs should have changed their tune when faced with outsourcing: Expand your skillset to ensure you're more than just an expensive commodity.

1. Why do you think the writers won't be able to do the same? They are writers, they aren't idiots.

2. That's great advice for buggy horses who want to win the game of musical chairs, but when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing?

> Why do you think the writers won't be able to do the same? They are writers, they aren't idiots.

Didn't say they were. Was only addressing the comment about SWEs.

> when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing

What they did after the dotcom crash - become the upper 15-20%, shift to another job in tech (project management, devops, etc) or switch entirely to another job like car sales, accounting, or greeting customers at Walmart.

We're in the business of making the same thing happen to ourselves.

About the same as programmers will feel when language models churn out better software than human programmers are capable of. Based on some blog posts from this morning, it seems ChatpGPT already conquered coding WordPress plugins despite it's notoriously difficult and nonsensical codebase, and at this rate ChapGPT should be able to replace most programmers by Independence Day. It should gain sentience on or by August 29th.

Sarcasm aside, the volume of scripts has never been the problem in Hollywood. Everybody and their mother has a screenplay. 99% of screenplays that are actually purchased aren't worth making. There are plenty of people who make a good living, outearning the average SV FAANG programmer, just churning out 1 or 2 C-movie scripts a year that they might spend a week or two writing.

And even the screenplays that get made aren't very good. One of my former clients made his fortune making D-movie action films, some of which you may have seen on cable or streaming. The entire portion of the screenplay dedicated to the gunfight at the end of one of his recent films was: "They have an epic fucking gunfight. Explosions everywhere. It's FUCKING AWESOME." (If you look up the screenplay for the movie adaptation of SWAT, the minutes-long fight at the beginning of the film is similarly scripted. By the way, that movie made $200m+.)

> ..allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. ...

There's a word for that, it's called privilege. Unionization is a lose-lose solution. You should also realize that whenever highly skilled workers are the critical bottleneck in a profitable industry they'll rack up high compensation as a matter of course, even in the most highly competitive, merit-based environment. That's why archaic and even medieval institutions such as guilds only make things worse by hobbling the industry.

How can you say that the union is privileged and in the next sentence say it's lose-lose? Privilege means the union won something.

…do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage? And has been for almost a century?

I could not think of any industry less “hobbled” than Hollywood. They have a sign worshipping itself sprawling across some of the most expensive hillside real estate in the country.

Regardless, as another commentator pointed out— VFX artists are the largest group of non-union workers in Hollywood. They’re also the most overworked and lowest paid— I’m talking about near minimum wage working on a movie with as a high a budget as Marvel. Oftentimes entry-level assistants to assistants to cameramen make more than them.

Know your worth, and charge for it.

> …do you know how much Hollywood is worth? Not just financially but socially, historically, and politically on the global stage?

AIUI if you run the numbers, the content industry is worth a lot and Hollywood is a big chunk of that, but the tech sector still wins handily.

VFX is a highly visible industry, that people want to be in even with the cost of low pay or bad work conditions. It's quite comparable to videogame development, which is one of the worst sectors to be in "tech".

Also looking at the trajectory of Hollywood its all down, down, down. Award show ratings have been plummeting faster than a meteorite[1]. Box Office sales have been dropping for years and this was before covid, after covid sales are back but are at a level last seen since 2000! [1]. The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there are maybe 2-3 movies a year that are watchable. Hollywood is not a industry that tech should look to for guidance.

[1] - https://businessreview.berkeley.edu/award-shows-a-thing-of-t...

[2] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

> The quality of movies and most TV shows are abysmal and the numbers back this up. I feel the last decent movie I saw was Dune, and there are maybe 2-3 movies a year that are watchable.

Hollywood puts out maybe 2-4 "blockbuster" high-marketing-budget movies that are decent or better per year, sure, but the US film industry overall, and the smaller-splash side of Hollywood, produces probably 3-4x that many (and that's just the US—there are usually a bunch of decent-or-better foreign productions per year, too)

Do you know how much more there is to Hollywood than… wide release studio movies. Those are the most corporate of creative jobs. I won’t write a thinkpiece here, but if your only exposure to Hollywood is big box office movies that are released in every city in the US, you’re seeing just one slice of that industry. It’s like if you said tech as industry was SOLELY defined by FAANG, which also had a terrible year.

Nonetheless, Netflix is as much claimed by Hollywood as it is Tech. Apple too is thought as Hollywood-adjacent, as aside from Apple TV they’re also historically responsible for Pixar. Important to realize that working in tech does not mean every successful company is purely a tech company.

The last decade has been referred to in Hollywood as the "content explosion" because of how much more content (and money from it) is being produced. The decline of certain media is not evidence of a decline in industry, the opposite is true.