The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.
If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.
Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.
It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.
Eg, that they necessitated so called "rubber rooms" like these in the NYC public schools, where teachers got paid to do nothing while waiting on arbitration.
That's in a country with a median household income of $84k [2]
I think it's understandable why someone would feel they were doing well at bargaining and negotiating if they were taking home 4.7x as much as their neighbours and loved ones.
Folks in the games industry by all accounts have really shitty pay and working conditions so I can 110% understand why they'd unionise.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/?tab=levels&compare=Google%2CMeta%2CA... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Collective negotiation power can help with all of these, if we let it. It doesn't just stop at compensation.
If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).
When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.
All of my friends that are teachers do admit their union has flaws, but also are very grateful to have strong contracts, benefits, and people willing to fight for them when the school system tries to screw them over.
I have a pretty simple litmus test for them: are they opposed to H1B hiring, and would they have defended James Damore when he got ousted from Google for basically being autistic? I think the answer for many of them is a resounding no.
On opposing H1B as they are implemented now I agree with you, but in a hypothetical world with tech unions James Damore would still be advocating for large swathes of fellow union members to be removed. He was being misogynistic not “basically being autistic”.
But whether or not you agree with him, you should agree with the idea that one of the primary jobs of a union would have been to give him a fair defense regardless of whether the union leadership likes him or not. I don't think any of the tech unions would do that.
edit: Let me put it this way. Suppose you make an post in an internal politics discussion forum saying that you oppose the H1B program as it is, and then get fired because people claim that you hate immigrants and want your fellow coworkers to be deported. Do you think these unions would defend you?
In the real world case of long standing Teachers Unions in Australia (they vary by state) it is literally impossible to answer such a question on the basis of such a shallow construct.
The answer is both Yes and No - in any specific case the individual circumstances would be looked at - eg: as laid out Yes, they defend, however in most IRL cases the circumstances on the ground are far more complex, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a bunch of fellow peer union member coworkers to speak up in favour of not defending.
Yea. But if I made a claim that h1b holders were biologically disinclined to not be as capable of doing software, I wouldn’t.
Damore was just a misogynist.
Further, I posit that existence of such Unions serves as an incentive for voters not to simply assign more pay and benefits to such servants directly. Mayors and Governors know that it's always going to be a "Union game" and all they can do is negotiate - even when they're Progressives who actually want to pay teachers well.
It just gets worse when it's Cops instead of State School teachers.
Big assumption about "interests" lead to bad analysis, in my experience.
Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.
If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?
Yes, this is a big part of my critique.
I'm no lawyer and can't provide a useful explanation of the "why", but literally every educator I know is in the Educator's union. Same with Cops and Nurses. I don't know any airline pilots but I understand it's the same way.
Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),
- ensures a better product for customers
- ensures better working conditions for workers
- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)
- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs
I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.
There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
2) There is already a major labor surplus for video games. It's famously hard to get into and low paying because of it. There is no doubt someone else is willing to step in.
A union represents workers in a company, nothing to do with society. If workers strike the company stops making money, that's their leverage
It’s the leverage that the nascent union has over the company owners and management, who presumably still want to make money.
That being said the video game industry does have a deluge of naive young people willing to sell their bodies and souls for their dream, so I don’t have high hopes for this group.
Oh, they definitely deserve a union.
>unstable and poorly paid, low status job. Abused and exploited often.
Hmm… their job doesn’t really seem “cool enough” to have a union. They should just take it and shut up. I mean, they’re losers after all.
I’m sort of joking but it’s interesting how so many people “gatekeep” unions when people in unglamorous lines of work need unions more than almost anyone else.
I can't speak to this particular group, but Hasbro (parent company of WOTC) has been a horribly short-sighted steward of Magic and DND, so perhaps this will encourage other WOTC divisions to unionize as well.