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Comment by officeplant | Hacker News Reader

Unions and the labor laws they helped create save American lives. Unfortunately American companies have been upset about this for decades and fight it at every level. Including lobbying laws into places preventing industry strikes. Thus leaving us far behind countries with properly working unions like Germany as you mentioned.

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Most of the problems with US unions can be traced back to anti-union legislation that used the promises of entrenching current unions as a carrot to get the laws passed to suppress new unions. New unions are much harder to create today, even more so if there is an existing union that covers similiar employees to your own. And old established unions are hard to get rid of even if the majority of employees are unhappy with it and would rather it was either gone or replaced with a different union with different rules and leaders. And an old entrenched bureaucratic political position is an easy target for corruption.

Yes, unions at video game studios are bound to save so many lives.

In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.

Given the pattern of video game studios unceremoniously laying off people the second a game is complete and how health care in the US is overwhelmingly tied to employment, it's extremely plausible that somebody somewhere has died from lack of collective bargaining power. If it hasn't happened, that's most likely because people just leave the video game industry before they actually need those health care benefits.

>Yes, unions at video game studios are bound to save so many lives.

Stress & constant overtime crunch culture will absolutely be a detriment on the health and wellbeing of workers in any industry.

Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.

>In other words your comment is hyperbolic and does not apply to the topic at hand.

Welcome to the topic at hand.

>Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.

They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.

You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.

In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.

> you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.

I mean, those devs might unionize as well. Certainly would've helped both the ZA/UM and CD Projekt Red devs, for different reasons.

>I mean, those devs might unionize as well.

The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.

That caricature was so long ago a new caricature (from seven years ago) has emerged to lampoon it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpB9Aeq8lUA

Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-neijuan-invo...

Also, Foxconn manufacturing isn't exactly the same thing as NetEase video game development, even if they both exist within the same labor environment.

>That caricature

Foxconn workers killing themselves by jumping off their office budling is a caricature to you? How out of touch can you be?

Those tragedies largely ended after 2011. One would assume things have changed since then.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/apple-foxconn-factory-c...

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