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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

I am skeptical there is any customer benefit from unionization and it makes me concerned that MTG Arena might not be around for long term. As a big customer, I am worried about my investment in the platform with this announcement. MTGO still exists, I wish it had a better client.

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> I am skeptical there is any customer benefit

Unions aren't really there for customer service. Nonetheless, there's often times where the worker demand benefit customers too: Nurses fight for better nurse:patient ratios, benefiting patients too; teachers fight for the resources for them to teach well; starbucks baristas fight for a work pace that allows them to actually engage customers like the brand used to offer. etc

Unions rarely form because everyone is being treated well (humanely) and/or paid appropriately.

The extreme is, are you only happy when your products are created in sweatshops, or, worse, by slaves?

since some of their gripes are "use ai" and "rto" I don't think we are talking about a sweatshop.

Stability of development, features etc is to the customer's benefit.

Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.

Unions don't prevent downsizing when it is actually necessary. What they do prevent is downsizing to goose the stock price, and that is good for the customer.

GM circa 2008 would like to have a word

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the specifics. Can you link clear proof that unions were preventing necessary downsizing, and that this downsizing would have saved the company?

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